Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08, and The Contested Rhetorics of Democracy and Human Rights in China

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS: LIU XIAOBO,
CHARTER 08, AND THE CONTESTED RHETORICS OF

DEMOCRACY AND HUMAN RIGHTS IN CHINA
STEPHEN JOHN HARTNETT
This essay addresses Chinas Nobel Peace Prize-winning and now imprisoned
dissident, Liu Xiaobo, and his movement-launching manifesto, Charter 08,
as test cases of the fate of democracy in China. By examining how the Chinese
Communist Party attacked Liu and how international nongovernmental
organizations and political allies rallied to his cause, the essay probes the
limits of human rights discourse in an age of globalization, wherein transnational ideals of justice crash into nation states committed to local rather than
global forms of governance. Such rhetorical concerns are tempered by Chinas
increasing dominance of global markets, meaning this essay also studies the
complicated relationships among local activists, international justice movements, and neoliberal capitalism. The essay therefore maps how China marshals the rhetoric of globalization to enter new markets even as it deploys the
rhetoric of nationalism to block foreign influence. Nonetheless, Charter 08s
prophetic rhetoric and Lius heroic charisma have struck a chord internationally, thus opening a new chapter in the movement to call upon globalizing
human rights in the name of building democracy in China.
STEPHEN JOHN HARTNETT is Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at The
University of Colorado, Denver. For their intellectual support, thanks to my colleagues in the
Front Range Rhetoric Group, including Drs. John Ackerman, Hamilton Bean, Greg Dickinson,
Sonja Foss, Lisa Kernen, and Brian Ott. For their camaraderie while traveling in China, thanks
to Drs. Patrick Dodge, Donovan Conley, Sonja Foss, Lisa Kernen, Barbara Walkosz, and Steve
Thomas. Special thanks to Marty Medhurst and the journals reviewers for their exceptionally
helpful commentary.
2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved. Rhetoric & Public Affairs Vol. 16, No. 2, 2013, pp. 223274. ISSN 1094-8392.
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RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS
iu Xiaobo, the former professor, prolifc author, and prominent

activist, was arrested in Beijing on December 8, 2008, when
Giant Pandasa term used by dissidents to belittle the security
policecarried him away to an undisclosed location and undeclared
fate.1 Lius disappearance was a preemptive strike against Charter 08, the
blockbuster call for human rights and democracy in China, which Liu
and his allies were set to release to the Chinese public on December 10,
2008. Liu was held in secret detention until June 2009, when the Chinese
Communist Party (hereafter CCP, or Party) announced that he was
being charged with subverting the state. Liu was tried on December 23,
2009, in a closed court session that lasted less than three hours; he was
found guilty and sentenced, on Christmas Day, to 11 years in prison.2
Lius case was then complicated even further, and the importance of
Charter 08 heightened, when, on October 8, 2010, Liu was named that
years winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. While supporters of Liu and
Charter 08 celebrated the news as confrmation of the globalizing march
of a universalist version of human rights and expanding democracy, the
CCP responded to the award as if it was a declaration of war against
Chinese sovereignty, calling Lius triumph an obscenity.3 Hence, by
the autumn of 2010, Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08, and the Nobel Peace Prize
were rolled into a hotly contested international controversy regarding
some of the key questions of the early twenty-frst century, including,
will the CCP support democracy in China? Are human rights universal
norms or nation-specifc political practices? And what exactly did Liu
Xiaobo and Charter 08 say that so enraged the CCP, even while winning
the hearts of activists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and
democracy supporters worldwide? By addressing these questions, this
essay contributes to a recent surge of articles in Rhetoric & Public Affairs
about China and opens up fruitful dialogue about the dynamic character
of United States-China communication patterns, thereby offering an
occasion for pondering the shared political fates of the worlds two
super-powers.4
While this essay engages these sweeping questions about competing
versions of democracy and human rights in an age of globalization, its
core concerns are rhetorical: why did Charter 08 outrage the CCP, and
why did it speak so clearly and persuasively to international audiences?
What do the rhetorical characteristics of this text tell us about the
TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS
225
strategies available to activists who seek to change the policies of the

CCP? As the most celebrated and controversial document to emerge
from China in the past decade, Charter 08 offers unique opportunities
for probing these questions. Liu and Charter 08 make for confusing
reading, however, for while Charter 08 explicitly appropriates the form
and content of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Liu is also
a fre-breathing poet and provocateur whose rhetoric stands at the
crossroads of prophesy and diatribe. This essay argues that these combined, confusing, and sometimes contradictory rhetorical strategies are
the consequence of the Partys outlawing even the slightest political
criticism. Indeed, the CCPs repression drives anyone who is curious
about democracy underground, turning patriots into traitors and reformers into rebels: by closing all avenues of measured political debate,
the CCP forces advocates into diatribes and prophesies that further
polarize an already fractured nation. In this sense, Lius rhetorical
patterns may be understood as the consequence of living in a state that
outlaws political debaterepression from above creates rhetorical escalation from below. This rhetorical quandary perhaps explains why,
following the CCPs repression of Charter 08 and its arrest of Liu, he
moved from practicing rhetorical means of persuasion to a position
rooted in the political theater of sacrifcial martyrdom.
Although Charter 08 failed at domestic persuasion in China, this
essay chronicles how it was a stunning, perhaps game-changing, success
as an act of international persuasion. Recognizing the different responses of Lius domestic and international constituencies means that
addressing Charter 08 offers insights into one of the core dilemmas of
globalization: the tension between border-hopping transnational ideas
and entrenched national spaces, powers, and customs. As tienne Balibar observes, even while globalization tends to knock down frontiers
with respect to goods and capital, nation states tend to respond by
erecting a whole system of barriers against foreign labor, capital, and
ideas.5 This case study of the jockeying between Chinese dissidents,
global NGOs, U.S. politicians, and CCP offcials illustrates this tension
in action, as democracy activists and NGOs invoked globalizing norms
imported from abroad to support Liu, while the Party defended its
positions in the name of protecting national honor and cultural auton-
226
omy against imported dangers, what the criminal verdict against Liu
called despicable influence[s].6 This essay therefore extends the complexity of D. Robert DeChaines characterization of globalization as a
threat and a promise by mapping how threats and promises depend
on the audience in question.7 In this case, Charter 08 was received as a
dire threat by the CCP but as a glowing promise by Chinese dissidents,
international NGOs, and some progressive forces in the U.S. government. Charter 08 therefore offers a compelling case study for watching
how globalization ensures that any text engaging in persuasion on a
grand scale, even if productive for one or multiple audiences, is bound to
offend other audiences, for while globalization means that everything
circulates, it does not mean that readers or listeners share a set of norms
and expectations for interpreting global texts. In short, studying Liu
Xiaobos case illustrates how globalization accelerates circulation but
short-circuits understanding.8
To pursue these arguments, the essay unfolds in three sections. First, to
put the human rights questions asked here in theoretical context, the essay
opens by addressing the debate between those who support a universalist
version of rights and those who support a particularist version of rights. As
we shall see, this debate carries deep political conflicts tinged in large part by
the history of colonialism. Second, to examine how Charter 08 enacts one
side of this human rights debate, and to demonstrate the rhetorical dilemmas of persuasion in an age of globalized texts, the essay examines Charter
08s confusing oscillation from offering prudent means of accommodation
to leveling diatribe-laced threats to unleashing prophetic visions. Third, to
watch how these human rights and rhetorical questions played out on the
international stage, the essay chronicles the eruption of debate following
Lius receiving the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize. The CCPs responses to Liu,
Charter 08, its supporters, and international rights advocates are interspersed throughout the three sections. Taken as a whole, the essay illustrates
how the rhetorical habits of democracy work well for persuading international actors already committed to supporting a universalist version of
human rights, but not for persuading the CCP to change its ways. Liu
Xiaobos Charter 08 therefore stands as both a stunning rhetorical triumph
(in international venues) and a dismal rhetorical failure (in China), and
hence as a provocative occasion for thinking about the complexity of
persuasion in an age of globalization.
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CONTESTING HUMAN RIGHTS IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

While the bulk of this essay engages in detailed rhetorical criticism of
Charter 08 and Liu Xiaobos other major documents, it is important frst to
outline the two major strands of human rights thinking that have guided
U.S. and Chinese responses to this international affair. On the one hand,
when the U.S. government and international NGOs ratcheted up the pressure on the Party, they did so in the name of a universalist version of human
rights that supposedly transcends national boundaries and local customs.
For example, the U.S. Congress, acting as if it could dictate policy to China,
and assuming to speak for norms that are self-evident and apolitical, produced a resolution demanding that China immediately release Liu Xiaobo
and begin making strides toward true representative democracy.9 On the
other hand, when the CCP responded, it relied upon claims of national
sovereignty and cultural autonomy, charging that anyone calling for
Western-style human rights and democracy in China acted as a shock troop
for imperialism. For example, Chinas Foreign Ministry spokeswoman,
Jiang Yu, claimed that any attempt to influence Chinas handling of Liu and
other democracy advocates amounted to gross interference with Chinas
sovereignty.10 In assuming that it can tell the CCP what to do, the U.S.
Congress reprised a long-standing pattern of arrogance, enabling the CCP
to invoke the ghosts of colonialism and to worry about Chinas allegedly
threatened national sovereignty. The Partys response was no more sophisticated, as it demonstrated a typical intransigence whereby it claims an
extreme version of exceptionalism that places China outside evolving international rights norms. This deadlock illustrates how the United States and
China are stuck in a dangerous rhetorical pattern wherein the United
Statesclaiming to speak for a universalist version of human rightsand
Chinainvoking a particularist and Communist version of rightsdo not
seek common ground, instead provoking each other to alarming levels of
nationalist chest-thumping.11 This case study therefore provides international evidence confrming Leonard Hawess claim that instead of resolving disputes . . . rights-based arguments more often than not escalate
antagonisms.12
The question of how the United States and China marshal antagonistic
versions of human rights is intriguing, for while Chinas actions regarding
Liu and Charter 08 provoked the ire of many observers, it should be noted
228
that Michael Ignatieff, the director of Harvards Carr Center for Human
Rights Policy, recently observed that human rights have become unthinkingly imperialist.13 In fact, Samuel Moyn has demonstrated that Westernstyle human rights have long been criticized by Third World constituents
who have been less interested in implementing U.S.-style norms of free
speech and human rights than in establishing anti-colonialand often
Communistversions of national sovereignty.14 As Party functionary Qian
Si intoned in 1960 in high-Maoist style, human rights are nothing more
than the right of the bourgeoisie to enslave and oppress the laboring
people.15 Updating this thinking in 2010, the CCPs China Daily argued, in
response to Lius Nobel Peace Prize, that countries have no right to evaluate the human rights situations in other countries, for sovereignty is
always the prerequisite.16 While some Western readers may be inclined to
read such responses as propaganda, it is important to note that the CCP has
in fact developed its own consistent position in these matters. Part of that
tradition is based on flagging the hypocrisy of Western cultures, where, as
argued by Xiao Weiyun, Luo Haocai, and Wu Xieyung, everywhere there is
widespread unemployment, inflation, serious crime, racial discrimination,
oppression of women, drug addiction and traffcking, etc. Where is the
human dignity? From this position, dominant Western notions of human
rights, which care so little about economic equality, are nothing but a
fraud.17 For the CCP, a better version of human rights supports the rights
to subsistence and development, which can best be pursued when no one
places his own rights and interests above those of the state and society.18
In sum, for the past 50 years the Party has argued that its local confgurations of national sovereignty and Communist versions of economic development trump universal versions of human rights, which are seen as
nothing less than excuses for political colonialism and economic exploitation. Moreover, given the revelations about U.S.-sponsored atrocities in
Abu Ghraib, Guantanmo Bay, and elsewhere, Wang Jisi reports that cynicism among Chinas leaders is so widespread regarding the United
Statess human rights practices that no one would openly affrm that the
Americans truly believe in what they say about human rights concerns.19 If
we hope to understand the complexity of Liu Xiaobos case, the furor caused
by Charter 08, and the fate of human rights and democracy in China, then
we will need to take this alternative perspective seriously.
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On the other hand, there are good reasons to fear the mercenary relativism called for by the CCP, for as Ignatieff has noted, it is the invariable alibi
of tyranny.20 Gerard Hauser has likewise cautioned against giving up the
search for principled common ground in international human rights discourse, as his research on political prisoners has found that dictators like to
use cultural discourseas opposed to universalist discourseas a cover
for brutality.21 By examining Liu Xiaobos case, this essay demonstrates
how the prevailing norms of human rights discourse in an age of globalization remain stuck in provincial patterns, for whether the United States
pushes its allegedly universal version or the CCP pushes its avowedly
anti-colonial version, both nations appear to use human rights talk as a
rhetorical battering ram for pursuing national interests.22
To help work through this apparent impasse, Ignatieff argues that advocates who frame human rights as universal and non-negotiable moral
trump cards risk turning historically specifc laws into a species of idolatry: humanism worshipping itself. In contrast to such paradoxically secular
idolatry, Ignatieff proposes that we approach human rights in a minimalist
fashion, seeing them not as transcendent laws thundering across borders
but as limited injunctions against barbarism. Such thin rights do not go
on to defne what their freedom to should consist in, for all they proclaim
is certain specifc freedoms from clearly defned forms of cruel and
unusual punishment.23 Diane Orentlicher praises this position as enacting
prudential humanism, yet as David Hollinger notes, the rulers of authoritarian regimes would be foolish not to recognize that prowling within the
minimalist bag of such prudential humanism is an ambitious liberal
reforming cat.24 For example, when Archbishop Desmond Tutu celebrates
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a subversive instrument
available to overturn injusticethis is precisely the activist, revolutionary
version of rights that the Party fears.25 The controversy regarding Liu
Xiaobo, Charter 08, and the Nobel Prize hinges on this distinction between
two interpretations of human rights: do calls for such rights point to the
reformist and civic-minded task of charting a roadmap for prudential
humanism, or are they Trojan horses housing ambitious liberal reforming
cats intent on overturn[ing] injustice and, as the CCP fears, subverting
existing states?
Answering these questions within the specifc United States-China context addressed here requires familiarity with Liu Xiaobos record of activ-
230
ism, which, as interpreted by the Party, points not toward prudential

humanism but toward revolution. Liu had been on the radar of the CCP
since the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989. Earlier that summer,
he left a post as a visiting scholar at Columbia University, in New York City,
to return to Beijing, where he played a prominent role in organizing the
protests that prompted the Partys crackdown. Liu was subsequently sentenced to 21 months in prison. He was again targeted by the CCP in 1996,
when he received three years in one of Chinas feared re-education through
labor (RTL) camps as punishment for his pro-democracy writings. Upon
his release from the RTL, Liu renewed his calls for China to move toward
democracy while escalating his diatribes against the Party. For example, in a
1999 poem he tarred the Partys offcials as trained/to uphold a hideous
lie; he called the CCPs tenure in power the lie of a century; referring to
May Day celebrations in Tiananmen, he lamented how amid glorious
pomp/murder weapons will roll once again across this square.26 Because
such diatribes appealed to international NGOs intent on toppling communism, Liu was awarded the Reporters without Borders Press Freedom Prize
in 2004, elevating him into the pantheon of global celebrity activists.27 By
this time, he was serving as president of the Independent China PEN
Center, the Beijing-based and globally linked chapter of the worldwide PEN
Center coalition that represents authors and free speech advocates.28 Following his disappearance in 2008, Liu received awards from the PEN
American Center (in 2009) and Human Rights Watch (in 2010). Thus,
when Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize in October 2010, it was widely hailed as
a rebuke to the Party and as confrmation of Lius long-time bravery,
eloquence, and persistence.29 And so, by 2010, Liu had become a synecdoche for the global human rights debates outlined herein, in which international human rights advocates and local dissidents marshal one rhetorical
strategywherein human rights are celebrated as a universal birthright and an
ineluctable component of globalizationwhile the CCP marshals another
wherein the needs of state sovereignty require defensive action against
colonialists.
It is important to note that the Partys concerns were based on hard
historical lessons. While Western intellectuals hail PEN, Human Rights
Watch, and the Nobel prizes as markers of enlightened cosmopolitanism,
the CCP sees some of these groups as fronts for U.S.-driven meddling. This
position is not without cause. In fact, the PEN chapter Liu led in China is
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funded in part by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which in

turn derives its funds from the Unites States Agency for International
Development (USAID).30 Because of these ties to Cold War cultural organizations, the CCP has long been wary of PEN; as Frances Stonor Saunders
argues, starting in the early 1960s the CIA made every effort to turn PEN
into a vehicle for American government interests by attempting to link
PENs activities and personnel to the CIA-run Congress for Cultural Freedom. Saunders argues that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and other
such CIA-backed cultural organizations, amounted to hidden weapon[s]
in Americas Cold War struggle against communism.31 Thus, in 1983,
when President Ronald Reagan launched the National Endowment for
Democracy (it was the new incarnation of the disbanded Congress for
Cultural Freedom), William Blum reports that its raison dtre is to do
somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades
manipulate the political process in a target county. The NEDs antiCommunist activism was so well-known that Blum calls it Washingtons
specially created stand-in for the CIA.32 Knowing these facts should help
Western readers to understand why the CCP responded to Liu Xiaobo and
Charter 08 with such fury: the Party placed this fgure and this text within a
Cold War narrative, wherein the NED and Chinas branch of PEN have
murky funding streams and missions tainted by their association with the
CIA. To watch how Charter 08 streamed into the heart of this debate, I turn
now to a detailed rhetorical analysis of the text that landed Liu Xiaobo in jail.
CHARTER 08'S APPROPRIATION OF DEMOCRACY AND THE DILEMMAS

OF PERSUADING A DICTATORSHIP
While the Partys response to Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08 outraged global
rights advocates, analysis of his rhetoric indicates that his patterns of association (his referencing of fgures, texts, and norms foreign to Confucianism
and hostile to communism), his use of prophetic language, and his habit of
sliding from reasoned argument toward heated diatribes clearly signaled
what the Party took to be hostile intentions. If calling upon the rhetorical
roots of democracy enabled Charter 08 to strike many international readers
as a rousing tribute to the core principles of enlightenment and modernity,
then those same tropes struck the CCP as little more than euphemisms for
U.S.-led aggression. Moreover, because Charter 08 so clearly bases its form,
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key terms, and guiding ideals on foundational Western political declarations, the text can feel both confused and confusing, as if it is more interested in persuading Western than Chinese readers.
Consider the fact that Charter 08 was named to echo Charter 77, the
Czechoslovakian document that helped spawn the Velvet Revolutionit
thus flew into Chinese political life proudly bearing the imprint of Vclav
Havels thinking in particular and the hopes of anti-Communist Western
intellectuals more broadly.33 To cement that leaning toward the West,
Charter 08 was released to the Chinese public on December 10, 2008, the
60th anniversary of the United Nations celebrated and contested Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (hereafter UDHR).34 Charter 08 opens with a
foreword offering a ten-paragraph-long history of China, including these
framing devices:
A hundred years have passed since the writing of Chinas frst Constitution.
2008 also marks the sixtieth anniversary of the promulgation of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, the thirtieth anniversary of the appearance of
the Democracy Wall in Beijing, and the tenth of Chinas signing of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We are approaching the
twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy
student protesters.35
Beginning with the Republics frst (and comparatively liberal) constitution

in 1908, moving to the U.N.s seminal 1948 UDHR (which the Communists
initially supported but then denounced), to the key pro-democracy events
of 1978/1979 (which Deng Xiaoping crushed), to one of Chinas few (and
largely forgotten) nods to international norms of human rights, and fnally
to the tabooed atrocities of 1989all of which the Party has tried to erase
from popular memoryCharter 08 opens with a rousing dose of antiCommunist history.36 In fact, in contrast to the uncountable struggles, the
long trail of human rights disasters, and the abyss of totalitarianism
foisted upon the Chinese frst by Maoism and more recently by the Partys
modernizing autocrats, the authors of Charter 08 claim that they have come
to believe that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values.
They ask the question that confronts China and the world: Where is China
headed in the twenty-frst century? Will it continue with modernization
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under authoritarian rule, or will it embrace universal human values, join the
mainstream of civilized nations, and build a democratic system?37
To begin answering that question, the authors invoke the U.S. Declaration of Independence to celebrate the rights of citizens to freedom, to
property, and to the pursuit of happiness. The call for such rights comes
wrapped within a threat, as the authors of Charter 08 close their foreword
with the claim, the decline of the current system has reached the point
where change is no longer optional.38 The implication is clear: the CCP can
reform itself by embracing American-style rights, or it will face a possible
revolution led by the authors of Charter 08. Considering how the U.S.
Declaration of Independence led to the downfall of the British Empire in the
New World, how the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen
helped to topple the monarchy, how Charter 77 hastened the collapse of
the Soviet Unions hold on satellite states in Eastern Europe, and how the
UDHR was turned into a mobile weapon against communism during the
Cold War, observers cannot blame the CCP for taking that threat seriously.
While Ignatieff, Hawes, and others have tried to argue for human rights
in a minimalist fashion intended not to threaten national sovereignty, Lynn
Hunt observes how the demands elucidated in the documents noted have a
tendency to cascade, often achieving what she calls the bulldozer force of
the revolutionary logic of rights.39 As students of this bulldozer force,
and as the leaders presiding over what Perry Link has called Chinas new
national mood of insecurity, there can be little surprise that the CCP read
Charter 08 as a dire threat.40 This was no misreading, for as I demonstrate,
the document offers a stunning rebuke to the Partys current leadership, to
the past 50 years of Communist rule, and to a nation that has lost its way, all
while invoking canonical Western texts and ideas. Charter 08 thus stands as
the culmination of a generation of Chinese New Enlightenment thinking,
which Wang Hui characterizes as driven by an oppositional, antiorthodox,
and antiestablishment pro-Western tendency.41
For example, following the foreword, the next section of Charter 08 is
titled Our Fundamental Principles; it includes six italicized terms accompanied by a defnition, with each principle based on a foundational text of
Western democracy. The frst principle is Freedom, which bears eight rights;
of these, the frst fourfreedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom
of assembly, [and] freedom of associationare direct appropriations of
the U.S. Constitutions First Amendment, hence saddling the CCP with the
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uncomfortable task of pursuing reform by adopting the foundational text of

Chinas chief rival for twenty-frst century global leadership.42 The second
key term is Human Rights, which are described as the inherent rights to
dignity and freedom with which every person is born.43 This second
claim echoes the preamble to and Article 1 of the UDHR. These frst two
fundamental principles argue, in short, that Chinas future can in no way
be Communist, as the change called for would mean adopting the U.S.
Constitution and the U.N.s UDHR as models. Whether these moves would
save the nation or not, it would be diffcult for the CCP to accept such
proposals, foras is consistent with prophetic rhetoricthey offer no route
toward change that does not mean humiliation for the Partys leaders and
the likely destruction of the Party. As James Darsey has observed, such
prophetic rhetoric violates one of the traditional functions of rhetoric by
emphasizing separation over identifcation.44 Thinking historically, Stephen Lucas has shown how the Western worlds great political declarations,
which tend to share similar rhetorical protocols, have all been issued amid
a breakdown in the standard operations of government.45 Perhaps because of this breakdown, the contents of such declarationsbold, daring,
uncompromising, accusatory, self-righteousoften appear to preclude the
possibility of prudence and negotiation. Following in this tradition, Charter
08 produces separation at home, yet its appropriation of long-standing
and cherished rhetorical norms enables Western readers steeped in Enlightenment principles to feel an intense sense of identifcation with Liu and
his fellow Chinese dissidents. In an age of globalization, identifcation and
separation transcend local politics while speaking to multiple international
audiences.
The third key term of Charter 08 indicates how some Chinese believe the
Partys embrace of free markets has created a nightmarish version of communism that produces wealth gaps reminiscent of the Gilded Age in the
United States.46 Moreover, as China has pushed relentlessly into new lands
along its contested southern/Buddhist and western/Muslim borders, so
ethnic and religious tensions have flared, particularly in Tibet and Xinjiang.47 Responding to this rising economic, ethnic, and religious tension, the
third key term of Charter 08 is Equality, which the authors argue should
apply regardless of social station, occupation, sex, economic condition,
ethnicity, skin color, religion, or political belief.48 In asking for Freedom,
Human Rights, and Equality, the authors of Charter 08 offer a stunning
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rebuke to the Chinese Communist Party; by doing so in language that

echoes the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the
UDHR, they situate themselves as champions of the same Western, Liberal,
and Enlightenment traditions that the CCP has long seen as cover for
colonialism. This may not have been the best persuasive strategy, for Susan
Shirk, the long-time China observer and former Deputy Assistant Secretary
of State for United States/China relations, has cautioned that such shaming
rhetoric is doomed to failure. Our [American] hopes for political reform in
China, she argues, will never be realized through outside pressure.49 And
so, while human rights advocates railed against the Party, and while Charter
08 invoked the foundational texts of Western democracy, the criminal
verdict against Liu convicted him for the grave act of inciting subversion of
state power.50
The question, then, is whether asking for Freedom, Human Rights, and
Equality was an attempt to subvert the CCP or a last-ditch effort to help
save the Party from its own worst habits? Would pursuing such goals
destroy national unity and peace, as the Party claims, or would it help a
reformed Party achieve political legitimacy, spawn a new wave of intellectual and economic creativity, and enable China to assume the mantle of
enlightened global leadership, as the authors of Charter 08 hope? The next
three key terms from the documents Fundamental Principles help to
answer that question, for the authors of Charter 08 call here for Republicanism, meaning a U.S.-style separation of powers balanced among different
branches of government.51 The next term, Democracy, argues that the
legitimacy of the state should flow up from the people, who get to choose
their leaders in periodic competitive elections. In short, democracy is a
modern means for achieving government truly of the people, by the people,
and for the people.52 Echoing President Abraham Lincolns monumental
line from his 1863 Gettysburg Address makes obvious rhetorical sense, but
not necessarily political sense, for while the passage provides stirring oratory, it is hard to imagine the CCP engaging in political reform by adopting
the prophetic language of a president who fought a Civil War in the name of
higher valuesprecisely the thing the Party fears most.53 Put differently,
whereas Western readers have come to understand the historically prophetic language of democracy as a beloved but compromised cultural inheritance that, when put into practice, leads toward moderation, prudence,
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and sometimes stalemate, the CCP heard such language in a literal sense,
and understood Charter 08 as a call to incite a revolution.
Still, given more than a decade of double-digit economic growth, the
presence of strong nationalism, the continued power of the relatively homogenous Han majority, and the ever-present fear of political turbulence, it
is possible that even while the authors of Charter 08 invoke Western ideals
and rhetoric, an open election at the national level could return the CCP to
power. A more confdent Party therefore might have read Charter 08 not so
much as a prophetic attempt to destroy it as a moderate means of working
toward even greater political legitimacy. Writing from prison to Deng
Xiaoping in November 1983, Democracy Wall hero Wei Jingsheng observed how the Partys habitual suspicion craze led it to react in an overly
sensitive fashion to political critiques; because of the CCPs perpetual
insecurity, it reacted as if anyone with opinions different from their own
were an enemy force planning to usurp their power.54 Much as this
habitual insecurity led the Party to imprison Wei in 1979, and to respond to
the Tiananmen protesters in 1989 with unnecessary severity, so it led the
Party to perceive Charter 08s call for Freedom, Human Rights, Equality,
Republicanism, and Democracy as the rallying cries of an enemy force.
Fei-Ling Wang thus observed in 2011 that the Party is stuck in panic
mode.55
Consider the sixth key Fundamental Principal, the call for Constitutional Rule, which, for the authors of Charter 08, means that the legal
system and legal regulations should not be devised by fat but by the people
in elected assembly.56 This may sound like a radical threat to the Party, but
in fact China has a Constitution and various bodies charged with amending
itthe Party even passed a National Human Rights Action Plan in 2009
meaning a more supple and confdent Party might have sought not so much
to destroy Charter 08 as to implement it in a limited way, to explore its
provisions via qualifed steps that could have meshed with existing documents and practices, thus enhancing the legitimacy of a reconstituted government.57 By refusing to pursue this possibility and instead charging Liu
with treason, the Party made a dramatic interpretive move: it escalated his
rhetoric from a loving critique of a nation that needs change into a hateful
attack on a government that needs to be overthrown.
Indeed, Charter 08s demands were perceived by the Party not so much as
loving nudges toward prudential humanism as revolutionary calls for
237
trouble. By mid-December 2008, just two weeks after its release online,
Charter 08 had accrued over 10,000 signatures, signaling to the Party that
the document was gaining steam as a revolutionary rallying cry.58 In retrospect, 10,000 supporters is a drop in the bucket of a nation with almost 1.5
billion inhabitants. Moreover, in the CCPs verdict against Liu, it noted that
the articles (alongside Charter 08) that landed him in court had accrued hits
on the web ranging from as low as 57 for one essay to as high as 749 for
anotherthese are hardly numbers that indicate a swelling movement.59
But the Party was in no mood for experimentation, as indicated in the
comments of Party offcial Jia Qinglin, who argued that China must build
a defensive line against interference by incorrect Western thinking.60 In
taking this hard-line stance, the Party confrmed what Western critics and
the authors of Charter 08 feared: that the Party was committed not to
pursuing political reform but to maintaining what Sophie Richardson,
Human Rights Watchs Asia Advocacy Director, called naked political
repression.61 Thinking historically, these events ft into an unbroken chain:
from the persecution of intellectuals under Mao in the 1950s and 1960s to
Dengs attacks on Democracy Wall activists in 1979 to the massacre at
Tiananmen Square in 1989 to Wei Jingshengs disappearance in 1994 to
Lius imprisonment today, the Party has shown scant interest in exploring
democratization and a stern commitment to practicing what Wei describes
as the despicable old habits of brutal repression.62 While the Partys
repression escalated Lius charges from critique to incitement, and turned
his local irrelevance into international stardom, it also shifted his tone from
sounding hyperbolic, or prophetic, or provocative, to hard-edged truthtelling, for the Partys responses confrmed Lius worst allegations.
Charter 08 switches gears in the What We Advocate section, as it
moves from invoking canonical Western ideals to offering a hard look at
what a reconfgured China might look like. This section of the document
includes two arguments that, if enacted, would blow the lid off existing
political arrangements, hence raising serious questions about Lius political
judgment. Buried within another long list of demands, in a paragraph
calling for a decentralized and Federated Republic (demand 18), the
authors of Charter 08 propose ways for China to act as a responsible major
power. They argue that the freedoms that already exist in Hong Kong
and Macao should be supported and that Taiwan should be approached
with the goal of negotiating as equals . . . [who are] ready to compromise.
238
Regarding the national-minority areas of China, they call for seeking

ways to fnd a workable framework within which all ethnic and religious
groups can flourish. We should aim ultimately, they claim, at a federation of democratic communities in China.63 They are talking about dismantling the empire. The problem is that Taiwan is not seen by the Party as
an equal so much as a break-away state to be recaptured.64 Depending on
how you delineate the ancient lands of Tibetnot the shrunken administrative apparatus now called the Tibet Autonomous Region but the much
larger zones where Tibetans have lived for centuriesthat ethnic/political
area amounts to anywhere between 20 and 30 percent of Chinas current
landmass, holds the future of regional water supplies, and serves as one of
the keys to Chinas southward-looking military plans.65 Hong Kong is one
of the great economic engines of global capitalism, and Macao is a thriving
metropolitan zone of international investment.66 The sprawling Muslim
Uyghur lands encompass the western rim of China and hold incalculable
mineral reserves, to say nothing of serving as a buffer between China and
Russia.67 To pursue Charter 08s proposed federation of democratic communities, its imagined peeling away of these valued holdings in the name of
local governance and cultural autonomy, therefore would amount to the
end of Great China ambitions. It takes little imagination to fgure that no
Chinese political offcial would willingly preside overnor would most
Chinese citizens supportthe dissolution of the nations current holdings.
The Peoples Daily thus lambasted Liu as a traitor, noting that chief among
his crimes was his hope to separate China into distinct regions.68 Another
Party outlet noted that if Lius argument was taken seriously, then the
whole country would fall apart.69 Yet another source warned that if
Chinese people do act according to his [Lius] desire, the country will surely
suffer from wars and conflicts.70
Charter 08s 18th demand is therefore rhetorically inept: it asks too
much, it cannot help but fail while demonstrating that its authors have little
interest in the governing dilemmas of realpolitik or the national ambitions
of their Chinese neighbors. As Theodore Windt observed of the diatribe as
a genre, its major weakness is not nihilism but romanticism.71 In this
sense, Charter 08s 18th charge fails not because of its boldness but because
it reveals its authors naivety, their romantic hope that Western-style notions of democracy and cultural autonomy could be marshaled against
Asias most powerful empire and a population immersed in what Liu once
239
called bellicose patriotism.72 While the CCP charged treason, it is important to note that this call for loosening the bonds of control over Chinas
fringe regions echoes the positions of expatriate activists working on behalf
of Tibet and Xinjiang.73 In an age of globalization, Charter 08s romantic
appeals resound in the salons of cosmopolitan internationalists and the
far-flung Chinese diaspora even while falling upon deaf ears at home.
The charge of naivety is particularly relevant regarding the documents
19th claim, the What We Advocate section, wherein the authors propose
Truth in Reconciliation (TRC). Following an international wave of TRC
work, Liu and his coauthors call for reparations to all those who suffered
political stigma during the long nightmare of Maos rule.74 While this
sounds like a noble idea, to undertake such a venture would touch hundreds
of millions of lives, affecting almost every family in China. In The Vagrants,
her chilling depiction of betrayal and brutality during the Democracy Wall
crackdown of 1979, the expatriate Chinese novelist Yiyun Li chronicles how
events in 1979 were colored by wounds inflicted during the Cultural Revolution. Speaking in an allegorical tone, wherein the Cultural Revolution and
Democracy Wall crackdown seem to melt into one ongoing tragedy, Li
recalls that in those dark days it seemed that being human was suffcient
reason for humiliation. Everyone was implicated in some way, either as
victim, perpetrator, snitch, or witness; as one of Lis characters warns, you
could be the butcher one day, but the next day you will be the meat on the
cutting board.75 Asking for reparations for Mao-era atrocities therefore
would be destabilizing, for pursuing reparations claims would open wounds
too deep, family histories too tangled, and a Pandoras box of ethical and
economic dilemmas.
The authors of Charter 08 hope to avoid this danger by implementing a
Truth Investigation Commission empowered to study past injustices
and atrocities, yet it is worth asking if the horrors of Maos wave-uponwave of mass killings and mass imprisonments are too vast to unearth and
too damaging to integrate into a post-Communist government.76 As Evan
Osnos notes, speaking of those Chinese who dare contemplate the damage
of Maos reign, the memory of their societys dark potential still throbs like
a phantom limb.77 The causes of that throbbing are slowly being addressed
by a new generation of critics, and a savvier government would carefully
support such memory work, yet it is clear that such investigative bodies
must be handled delicately and require an immense amount of trust in the
240
judiciary, which presently does not exist in China.78 Moreover, as Priscilla

Hayner notes in Unspeakable Truths, her history of 21 TRCs, while most
international observers support such projects in the name of creating a
better future by excavating truths about horrible pasts, there are certain
situationsshe cites postwar Mozambique and Cambodiawhere the line
between perpetrators and victims is so blurred, the shades of guilt so fuzzy,
that digging into the details of past conflicts can be dangerous and destabilizing.79 What if China is such a place? As Michael Dutton, Hsiu-ju Stacy
Lo, and Dong Dong Wu have noted, contemporary China seems obsessed
with a history of humiliation and weakness. It takes a remarkable leap of
faith to imagine how unearthing the macabre details of what they call the
great politically unspeakable moment will help a new generation of Chinese citizens to work past their humiliation to construct a new nation.80 In
sum, for the authors of Charter 08 to assert such reconciliation demands
to a recalcitrant Party and a complacent citizenry indicates a strong sense of
hubris: the authors appear less interested in working toward what is politically possible than in unleashing prophetic visions. Thinking rhetorically,
the 18th and 19th claims are counterproductive for a domestic audience,
albeit falling squarely within international trends.
Charter 08 concludes with two rousing paragraphs wherein the authors
repeat the claim that the democratization of Chinese politics can be put off
no longer before noting that we stand today as the only country among the
major nations that remains mired in authoritarian politics. And so, to
begin the process of correcting this great wrong, we dare to put civic spirit
into practice by announcing Charter 08, which, if followed, could help
bring a brilliant new chapter to Chinese civilization.81 What the Party
fears, and what the authors of Charter 08 apparently do not see as worrisome, is the threat that such sweeping political changes could leadas
virtually every political transformation in China in the past 2,000 years
hasto the abyss of chaos. In January 2009, when Charter 08 was still
circulating on the web in China (it was shortly thereafter banned), Tang
Xiaozhao, a woman from Shanghai, was quoted as saying that although she
knew signing the document could lead to repercussions, she did so anyway,
for I am not afraid anymore.82 Yet the Party appears afraid, very afraid. In
fact, the CCP is so committed to preventing the democracy-causing-chaos
scenario that it now doles out 514 billion renminbi (RMB) per year (roughly
$80.3 billion) on stability maintenance, the internal policing mechanisms
241
that enforce the Partys dictatorship. Perry Link reports that this allocation
for domestic surveillance and repression is more than the government
spends on health, education, or social welfare, and is second only . . . to
the military.83 The secret police are so well-funded and so omnipresent
that the exiled authors of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party
assert that everyone lives in the shadow of terror and chokes upon the
black cloud of oppression.84 While that claim may be overblown, An Chen
notes that the slogan social stability is above all reflects a ubiquitous and
deeply held belief; as we will see in the conclusion, harmony is a dominant
trope in China.85 Tang Xiaozhao may claim that she is not afraid anymore, but the CCP and most Chinese citizens clearly arewhich puts the
burden on the authors of Charter 08 to seek a rhetorical strategy that could
diminish rather than escalate anxiety. This they did not do.
While it may be edifying to invoke canonical Western declarations about
universal human rights and democracy in the face of the CCPs tyranny, this
analysis demonstrates that shaming the Party, calling for dismantling the
Empire, and trying to pry open old wounds better left alonecalled for via
diatribes and prophetic rhetoric, and issued from an organization with Cold
War tiesare not likely to persuade either Party offcials or quiescent
neighbors to take the activists proposals seriously. As Andrew Kirkpatrick
suggests, these rhetorical strategies are guaranteed to enrage Chinese leadership, for, as one of his Chinese colleagues commented to him, they
convey the impression of being full of the scent of gunpowder.86 Still,
while Charter 08 failed to change the thinking of a nation predisposed to
privilege stability and harmony above all else, the document was highly
successful in motivating global audiences who already believed that the
Partys lock on power must end.
LIU'S NOBEL PRIZE, DISSIDENT SUPPORT, AND THE PROBLEM OF

REPRESENTATIVITY
While Liu was imprisoned in China, while Charter 08 was erased from all
Chinese websites, and while both Liu and Charter 08 remained largely
unknown in mainland China, the international community responded with
an outpouring of adoration, capped by the October 2010 announcement
that Liu had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Londons Financial Times captured
the tenor of the moment when it hailed the award as a ftting career capstone
242
for this martyr for democracy.87 The CCP responded with controlled fury
and, in a futile attempt to quash interest in the Nobel, denied Liu the right to
travel to Oslo to receive his award. To put this gesture in perspective,
consider that when the Soviet Unions Andrei Sakharov won the prize in
1975, his wife accepted the award for the imprisoned activist. This same
procedure was used in 1983, when Polands Lech Walesa was prevented
from attending the ceremony, and in 1991, when the son of Burmas Daw
Aung San Suu Kyi accepted her award while she was imprisoned by the
military junta. In refusing to allow the imprisoned Liu Xiaobo, or his wife,
Liu Xiawho was then under house arrest in Beijingto accept the award
in Oslo, the CCP replicated an empty chair embarrassment not seen since
1936, when the German peace advocate, Carl von Ossietzky, was locked up
in a Nazi prison and no one accepted his prize, which was placed in an
empty chair.88 As the New York Times editorialized, making such a comparison between Nazi Germany and contemporary China is chillingand
should shame Beijing.89 Still, while the moment became an international
black-eye for the CCP, no one could blame them for remembering that
Sakharovs and Walesas awards were precursors to the dissolution of
embattled Communist regimes.
And so, with Sakharov and Walesa as their worst-case scenarios, and
with the Nobel serving as a synecdoche for the universalistand allegedly
colonialistversion of human rights, the CCP launched an extraordinary
and unprecedented campaign against the Nobel Peace Prize, both attacking its legitimacy and pressuring other nations to boycott the award ceremony.90 That strategy succeeded in lining up eighteen states: Pakistan, Iran,
Sudan, Russia, Kazakhstan, Colombia, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iraq,
Vietnam, Afghanistan, Venezuela, the Philippines, Egypt, Ukraine, Cuba,
and Morocco, amounting to a roll-call of the worlds least democratic and
most troubled regimes and the Philippines, a young democracy with intimate trade relations with China.91 It is hard to imagine how assembling this
alliance of oppressive regimes, narco- and oil-fefdoms, failing states, and
dependent market partners could alter the CCPs international reputation
as a human rights violator. In fact, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag
argued that by assembling such an illustrious club of dictators and autocrats, China had become the center of a worldwide, anti-democratic
alliance.92 For those who think in terms of globalization, the signifcance of
the moment was clear: whereas discussions tend to focus on the West/
243
center attempting to force neoliberal capitalism and weak versions of

democracy onto developing/peripheral states, here was China building an
alternative form of globalization by supporting state-controlled markets
and one-party rule in what Stefan Halper calls the most brutal and backward regimes in the world.93 As the South China Morning Post (published
in Hong Kong) warned, such CCP-style globalization amounts to an attempt to muzzle the whole world.94
Hoping to counter such claims, the CCP devised its own award, the
Confucius Peace Prize, which was given to Lien Chan, the former vice
president of Taiwan and once a strong voice for the reunifcation of Taiwan
with China. The Taiwanese winner, described by the New Zealand Herald as
a Beijing stooge, announced, however, that he had never heard of the
prize, did not show up for the award ceremony in Beijing, and hence helped
to turn the frst Confucius Peace Prize ceremony into what Londons Daily
Telegraph described as a near farce.95 Not since the Tiananmen incident
of 1989 had the CCPs international reputation sunk so low. Precisely as Liu
Xiaobo had planned, his writings and actions, coupled with the Partys
crackdown, had captured a sympathetic global audience and were putting
the regime and its courts on the moral defensive.96
Internally, however, the CCP blocked such unflattering international
news and initiated a blistering campaign against Liu Xiaobo and his
supporters. For example, the ultra-nationalist China Tibet Online site
argued that the Nobel Committees decision was unthinkable and
ridiculous, and called the 1989 winner, the Dalai Lama, a Tibetan slave
master involved in armed rebellion. By celebrating insurgent fgures
such as Liu and the Dalai Lama, this site argued, the Nobel Peace Prize
illustrates the scheme of western powers to trigger unrest and chaos
in China.97 The Peoples Daily echoed these themes, dubbing Liu a
criminal convicted of agitation aimed at subverting Chinas government; this same source alleged that the Nobel Committees decision
was aimed at humiliating China.98 The Party also used the occasion to
rewrite history, arguing in China Tibet Online that Liu stands in a long
line of dupes, including those hooligans who were supported by
some western forces to trigger the turbulence that befell Beijing in
1989.99 Thus playing upon the long-standing tropes of humiliation-atthe-hands-of-meddling-Westerners, democratic-advocacy-equals-rebellion, and
Tibet-must-be-saved-from-itself-by-China, these party-controlled media
244
outlets countered the discourse of globalizing human rights and advancing democracy by marshaling fears about Chinas allegedly threatened
national honor.100 The CCP was so worried that democracy-supporting
Chinese would celebrate Lius award, the London Guardian reported,
that in the days surrounding the Nobel award ceremony, the police
ordered bars, restaurants, and cafes in Beijing to turn down reservations from parties of more than six people.101 The Partys alternative
globalization alliance and aggressive media strategy were thus coupled
with enhanced local repression.
Still, the Canadian Globe and Mail reported that the CCPs information
embargo hadnt been completely successful, as web-savvy netizens found
ways to learn of and speak about Liu Xiaobos award. Students at Zhongnan
University, in Hunan province, even displayed a banner on their campus
celebrating the event.102 The students and web-surfers were not alone, as
the Hong Kong-based China Media Project released a translation of a letter,
dated October 11, 2010, wherein 23 CCP reformers petitioned the Standing
Committee of the National Peoples Congress for free speech. Written by a
committee led by Maos former secretary, Li Rui, and the former editor of
the Peoples Daily, Hu Jiwei, the letter calls the CCPs political repression a
scandalous mark. The letter writers base their arguments on Article 35 of
Chinas Constitution, which guarantees the freedom of speech, press, and
assembly. Li and Hu charged the CCPs censors with violating the Constitution and functioning as invisible black hands who censor not only
activists but Premier Wen Jiabao, whose recent speeches supporting reform
have been blacked-out in China.103 This letter demonstrates that Liu and his
allies enjoyed some internal support: even some of the Partys elite fgures
backed the move toward more free speech and enhanced political freedoms.
Nonetheless, the BBC reported that as soon as October 13, 2010, two days
after its release, the Partys censors had already deleted the letter from
Chinese websitesthe Party reformers call for an end to censorship was
being censored.104
And so, while the world watched in fascination as the CCP blundered
into what Canadas National Post called a horrible embarrassment, the
Nobel award ceremony was galvanizing the West, as the Australian Daily
Telegraph argued.105 More importantly, the ceremony became a rallying
occasion for what the South China Morning Post called an unprecedented
reunion of overseas Chinese dissidents, as more than forty exiled activists
245
came together in Oslo, amounting to the largest gathering of such fgures

since the Tiananmen protests.106 Back in China, with Liu imprisoned and
the Party reformers censored, the Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, often called
Grandpa Wen because of his gentle demeanor, took the unprecedented
step of appearing at the National Petition Bureaua contested space that
leads as often to arrest as to the government hearing a citizens petitionto
announce that the CCP should serve the interest of the people.107 For
Chinese dissidents and international supporters of Liu and Charter 08, it
was hard not to see Wens act as a rebuke to Party hardliners and as tacit
acknowledgment that the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize was not in error. Indeed,
for optimists, it appeared that democracy was bubbling up, history was on
the march, change was in the air: led by Lius bravery and the Partys
ham-handed responses, the dream of globalization as an unstoppable wave
of universal human rights and democratic governance was being fulflled.
In fact, following Lius initial conviction in 2009, and then again following his receiving the Nobel in 2010, Chinas dissidents rallied to the cause,
launching a series of statements, interviews, andat least in the West
rallies on his behalf. These actions were marked, however, by the same
confusing rhetorical dynamics outlined above, wherein Chinese dissidents
invoke Western texts, fgures, and traditions in an effort to shame the Party.
For an example of this strategy, consider the opening of the One World
Human Rights Film Festival, held in Prague, Czech Republic, on March 11,
2009. The prestigious Homo Homini Award was being given that night by
Vclav Havel to the then-disappeared Liu Xiaobo, with the award being
accepted in Lius absence by his fellow Charter 08 signer (and perhaps
coauthor) Professor Xu Youyu, the noted philosopher, witness to the massacre at Tiananmen, and long-time advocate for reform. In his speech that
night, Xu argued that Charter 08 is not a subversive manifesto. What we
call for and what we demand, Xu said, is nothing but compliance with the
existing obligations. No call for revolution and chaos, Charter 08 is instead
intended to achieve reconciliation and consensus.108 This nod to existing
obligations indicates that the supporters of Charter 08 seek not to topple
the state but to help it honor its own foundational texts, which promise to
protect free speech and other modes of engaged citizenship. Speaking later
that summer, Xu said that he and his allies were calling for peaceful
evolution, not radical revolution.109 Hoping to speed that peaceful process
of evolution, Xu said in Prague that Charter 08 strives to instill an active
246
civic perspective, [an] ethos of citizenship, and joint civic responsibility for
public affairs. Perhaps recognizing that the greatest impediment to democracy is the Partys habitual insecurity and its production of a cowed and
compliant citizenry, Xu begged his listeners to realize that we must not
become resigned to living in fear and indifference.110 At this point in Xus
talk, it appeared that he was framing Charter 08 as a peaceful call for
prudential humanism, creating a space where the Party might consider its
authors suggestions, for the speech was bathed in a tone of hope, possibility,
and reconciliation. This is the frm-but-moderate (as compared to revolutionary or prophetic) position favored by many cosmopolitan intellectuals,
as indicated in one London Financial Times editorial, where Englands
captains of industry note that Liu and Xu and others have not sought to
instigate subversion but to encourage China to serve its people by granting the rights . . . Chinas own constitution formally guarantees.111
Talk of moderation is often complicated, however, by the hard rhetoric
of Chinas dissidents. For example, toward the close of Xus speech in
Prague, after establishing a tone of reconciliation and gradualism, he
switched gears and, almost by habit, as if he could not help himself, uncorked this diatribe: Stalinism has not yet died of decrepitude, and tries to
prolong its life with the help of [the] market economy, receiving infusions of
fresh blood capital from the whole world. In the new combination of
circumstances they have given birth to a monster.112 Xus speech thus
veered from prudently supporting Charter 08s hopeful intentions into a
name-calling tirade complete with references to blood capital and monsters. And so the Partys institutionalized tyranny crashed into the dissidents long-simmering hatred, leaving both sides trapped in a rhetorical
impasse. The result, as everyone knows, would be more arrests.
In fact, in December 2009, a group of 164 Charter 08 signers issued a
press release challenging the Party to arrest them. Their statement begins by
echoing the threat that lurks within Charter 08: serious injustice will bring
about social conflicts. Still, while threatening rebellion, the authors assert
their loyalty to the state by claiming that in signing Charter 08 they did no
more than perform our civic responsibility in accordance with the rights
affrmed by the Constitution. Moreover, like Xu, they argue that Charter
08s demands have never been considered to be contrary to any of the
existing laws and regulations. Such prudence is soon overwhelmed by a
sense of antagonism, however, as the authors assert that the indictment of
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Mr. Liu Xiaobo puts each of us on trial; if Mr. Liu Xiaobo is convicted, it is
equivalent to condemn[ing] every one of us as being guilty. We have no
choice but to bear punishment with Liu Xiaobo.113 These 164 signers of
Charter 08 invite the CCP to arrest them as well. It is hard to read the letter
without marveling at its authors courage, yet also diffcult not to question
their misplaced heroism. Under Maos leadership, the Party presided over
the death of as many as 70 million Chinese; in 1989, Deng Xiaoping ordered
the PLA to slaughter unarmed civiliansdoes anyone think the Party will
hesitate to add another 164 victims to that roll call of shame? And does
anyone believe that the majority of Chinas citizens, who are poor and
ruraland who will never read this letter, do not have access to Charter 08,
and know little if anything of these debateswill mourn the arrest of these
urban and wired advocates? Just in the past few years, the Party has locked
away such noted activists as Huang Qi, Tan Zuoren, Xue Feng, Xu Zerong,
Jin Haike, Xu Wei, and Zheng Yichun, to say nothing of Liu Xiaobo and
countless othersvery few Chinese will blink (or even know) if another 164
Charter 08 signers are added to that list.114
This brings us to the heart of the matter: Chinas pro-democracy activists
have more traction in the West than in their homeland. Following Liu
Xiaobos disappearance, but before his trial and conviction were announced, Human Rights in China published an interview with Professor
Ding Zilin. One of Chinas leading voices for openness and a signatory to
Charter 08, Ding is one of the founders of the Tiananmen Mothers group,
which is dedicated to uncovering the truth about the 1989 massacre, in
which Dings son, Jiang Jielian, was murdered. Because of her bravery, Ding
has suffered 20 years of repression and was nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2003. Asked about her activism, Ding said we want them [the
Party] to reckon with the will of the people, to know that the will of the
people cannot be cowed.115 With the ban on all forms of civic engagement,
however, and in the face of the repression of anything that even smells like
dissent, it is almost impossible to know the will of the people. For example,
Dings interviewers, representing the group Human Rights in China, are
based in Hong Kong and New York City, but are banned in mainland
China; wired cosmopolitans who live in democracies can check those websites daily, but Dings neighbors in Beijing cannot. When Ding claims that
the signers of Charter 08 stand as Chinas conscience, supporters of a
universalist version of human rights want to believe her, yet we must
248
remember that most Chinese citizens have never heard of Charter 08 or

Human Rights in China. Indeed, by creating a culture devoid of any political
debate, neither the Partys nor its opponents claims to speak for the people
can gain any traction; this is what Marina Svensson calls Chinas problem
of representativity, for who knows where the masses allegiances lie?116 As
Chinese media historian Zhao Yan has observed, once Mao seized power,
the news media nationwide degenerated into a lie-manufacturing machine.117 There can therefore be no public opinion in China, just the
Partys unilateral messaging and its citizens hushed musings.
The exiled authors of Nine Commentaries go so far as to claim that
because of Maos reign of terror, producing lies, tolerating lies, and relying
on lies became Chinese peoples lifestyle.118 Working within this vacuum
of informed discourse, where democracy is criminalized and the Partys
lies blanket the land, activists like Liu, Xu, and Ding may be the heroic
conscience of their neighbors or they may be deluded foolsin the
absence of any public deliberation, it is impossible to know. In Atop a
Volcano, a 2005 article attacking the Partys rule, Liu Xiaobo depicts China
as a nation about to burst at the seams, with protests of various size and
ferocity occurring at a rate of approximately 160 disturbances per day.119
Still, it is hard to know if these local events have any national pull, any larger
political agenda, for Liu, Xu, Ding, and the dissidents noted here act in a
void created by the Partys repression, where roiling markets have created
much public space but no public. Rather, as we shall see in the conclusion,
the Party has partnered with the interests of global capital to create a world
where agency is expressed as compliant consumerism, not as engaged
citizenship.
This alliance between global capital and local dictators has long been one
of Lius chief concerns. In fact, before publishing Charter 08, Liu was known
in China as one of the leading critics of Chinas manic swerve from communism to capitalism; he was no fan of the former, but he feared how the
latter offered his neighbors the Faustian bargain of giving up their hopes for
democracy in return for access to a new world of cheap baubles and alluring
trinkets. In 2006, Liu pointed to the doomsday picture of dictatorial
politics, framing his critique in apocalyptic terms. The Party, Liu trumpets,
has sought to buy off the people with the promise of a comfortable life,
producing a nation whose soul is rotten to the core. Here is the titanic
smirk of the diatribe mixed with the prophets habit of foretelling a coming
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catastropheit makes for blistering rhetoric. Writing in a full lather, Liu

thunders that in contemporary China not a single penny is clean, not a
single word is honest.120 The charge surely appeals to those already convinced of the Partys faultsit feels good to be so indignantyet it is hard to
imagine fruitful dialogue following such totalizing assertions.121
Indeed, a prudent critic could counter that Lius accusations go too far,
are too sweeping, and are unfair to the hundreds of millions of Chinese who
work hard, love their country, and seek nothing more than the rest of us: to
raise our families, work with dignity, and live in peace. Because Lius prose
is so sharp and biting, he eschews this simple fact, letting his anger lead to
sentences that are neither considered nor careful. Xing Lu, a ChineseAmerican scholar who experienced the terror of the Cultural Revolution as
a child, warns that such blistering language tends to reproduce violence. She
worries that as the children of Mao learned from him to speak in dogmatic
and radical tones, so Lius generation of activists have inherited this same
tendency of talking hard, thus creating a vicious cycle of escalating rhetorical aggression and violence.122 For further evidence of how Liu falls into
this trap, consider one of his 2007 essays, in which he spewed denunciations
against a Party that is not only incompetent but hopelessly inept.
Because the CCP is, as Xu noted, monstrous, and as Liu argues, both corrupt
and inept, then it makes sense to allege that the authoritarian system will
never learn to respect life and protect human rights.123 If this is so, if the
Party is irredeemable, then the only answer is revolution.
This dangerous conclusion conflicts with the tenor of one of Lius most
important works, his 1994 essay, That Holy Word, Revolution, wherein
he argues against perpetuating the heroic mythology and righteous indignation that drive calls for violent uprisings. Liu writes here in a commemorative and introspective mode, for he is looking back upon the events in
Tiananmen Square, about which he carries a heavy load of doubt regarding
the actions of both the government and the protesters. Much like the
murderous Red Guard before them, Liu observes that the students who
occupied Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989 had been driven mad
by revolution, that foundational trope of Maoism that taught generations
of Chinese to carry an exaggerated righteousness into their political
dealings. As Liu describes them, even those students hoping to end Maoism
and turn toward democracy acted with the fury and obsessional drive taught
to them by Maothey were anti-Maoists acting in the worst tradition of
250
Maoism. Looking back upon that fateful summer, Liu warns that if there is
to be revolution, there must be hatred, and where there is hatred, one fnds
a radical justice that shows no forgiveness. This is the path of war, of
bloodshed, of Cultural Revolutions. Instead, Liu steps back from the brink
to call for patience: bringing democracy to China must be gradual, peaceful, and long term, he counsels, and will depend on both the goodwill of the
people and the self-reform of the Communist Party. In fact, Liu realizes
that in todays China, the least costly way to democratization and modernization is self-reform of the Communist Party. And so Liu offers the
following goals:
All that needs to be done is to privately compensate the kin of June Fourth
victims; release all June Fourth political prisoners; restore to their former
positions those who, because of June Fourth, were unfairly treated; gradually
remove and demote those who rose to power on the blood of June Fourth; and
allow those who fled overseas because of June Fourth to safely return.124
This is a remarkable passage, for while these calls to action parallel the
content of Charter 08, they are framed in an entirely different tone, as
happening privately and gradually, as part of a slow transitional process
meant to democratize without chaos, and hence to sustain Chinas rise to
greatness while win[ning] the hearts of the people.125 Eschewing prophetic righteousness and angry diatribes, Liu offers the CCP a face-saving
route toward democracy. As Lius predecessor Wei Jingsheng argued in a
1991 letter to Jiang Zemin, reform seems more desirable because it is less
destructive than the violent revolution that frst Wei and now Liu imply is
likely to engulf China if it does not democratize.126 What makes Lius essay
so powerful is that its familiar threat is couched not in anger but in wisdom:
change will come to China, Liu argues, but only a fool would hope it comes
in the form of a bloodbath.
Lius major rhetorical artifacts therefore present us with three distinct
and contradictory models. Option one, as outlined in the prophetic tones of
Charter 08, is to pursue democratic change in China by absorbing the
lessons of Western-style and especially U.S.-style democracy and a universalist version of human rights. This is not happening. Option two, as
outlined in Lius earlier diatribes, is to overthrow an irredeemably corrupt
Party via revolution. This is not happening. Option three, as hinted at above,
251
is to go slow, to open up Chinese society from within, with the Party

controlling the pace of transformation. The key question is whether this is
happening, as the Party claims, or whether it is not happening, as dissidents
claim. For democracy supporters both in China and exiled abroad, any talk of
Party-led gradualism is a charade. In fact, the enraged authors of Nine Commentaries go so far as to claim that because of 60 years of Communist rule and
a generation of frenzied wealth creation, the Chinese people have lost their
humanity.127 If this is so, if the Party is unmovable and the nation has lost its
humanity, then domestic persuasion and Party-led reform are impossible.
Approaching this bleak conclusion may explain why Liu has courted
danger so relentlessly: he sees no alternative. As he wrote from Beijing on
December 29, 2009, while languishing in a prison cell, I have long been
aware that when an independent intellectual stands up to an autocratic
state, step one toward freedom is often a step into prison. Now I am taking
that step; and true freedom is that much nearer.128 In short, pursuing
international stardom via imprisonment is the course of last resort. If words
cannot do their job in the face of the Partys dictatorship and his neighbors
well-learned complicity, then Lius only choice (so he seems to believe) is to
put his body on the line, to draw global attention to the plight of Chinese
dissidents by willing himself into martyrdom. Liu has thus moved from the
realm of rhetorical persuasion to the symbolic theater of sacrifce. Seen from
this perspective, Lius strategy amounts to an attempt to perform his willingnesslike Martin Luther King Jr. and the Dalai Lama before himto
speak hard even if death will surely follow. As Darsey reminds us, martyrdom is a perfectly reasonable presentation of the claims of sacred commission.129 Given the apparent lack of any mass public support for the
dissidents, martyrdom might also, in Lius case, amount to a reasonable
political calculation: better to die as an imprisoned prophet than to live as a
free coward. It is a desperate bargain, for as Liu noted in a 2000 letter,
pursuing this version of heroism means foregoing the simple pleasures of
daily life to dance with lost souls.130
Such heroic actions take one perilously close to a self-aggrandizing
grandeur that violates the ritual propriety undergirding Confucianism,
wherein, as George Q. Xu argues, loyalty to the nation is the foundation
of all values.131 In this sense, Lius embodiment of cherished Western
values about heroism and innovation may be seen as a liability, for such
behaviorthe hallmark of Chinese New Enlightenment thinkingtreads
252
hard on the expectation of compliance to authority, which Ling Chen

claims is the foundation of moral conduct in the traditional thinking of
Chinas Confucian culture.132 Randy Kluver reminds us that piety, loyalty,
and submission to authorities stand among the key traits of Confucianism,
meaning that Lius brash appeals to globalizing human rights can feel to
some traditionalists like a form of cultural heresy.133 At the least, Liu
Xiaobos relentless presence on international websites raises the question of
what Richard B. Gregg famously called the ego function of protest movements.134 In fact, Liu argued in an editorial in the London Times that the
internet has the extraordinary ability to create stars and truth-speaking
heroes.135 Whether driven by ego or a selfless commitment to Chinas
bettermentor bothLiu has certainly sought to become a star by fulflling the prophetic narrative conventions established by King, Gandhi, the
Dalai Lama, Havel, and other truth-speaking heroes. As Rya Butterfeld
has shown, the CCP has long-tried to produce Model Worker heroes,
compliant proletarian icons meant to exemplify the spirit of the party.136
Lius strategy turns that cultural model on its head, replacing manual labor
with intellectual labor, Party-fawning nationalism with Party-bashing internationalism, and life-affrming good cheer with self-sacrifcing martyrdom. The irony of the situation is that Lius construction of this anti-Model
Worker persona was only possible with the Partys ham-handed support,
for the character Liu sought to buildthe Western-style critic, imprisoned
prophet, New Enlightenment spokesman, and anti-Confucian truth-speaking
heroneeded to be imprisoned.
CONCLUSION: ON HARMONY, BEING HARMONIZED, AND ARTFUL

DISSENT
While Liu fulflled this heroic narrative, the global market collapsed, leaving
the reeling United States to turn to China, for the frst time, as a supplicant
in need of loans, investments, and retail opportunities. Thus, despite all the
bluster of the debates of 2010, by the time Chinas President Hu Jintao
visited Washington, D.C. in January 2011, the New York Times announced
that U.S. Shifts Focus to Press Chinese to Open Markets.137 Sure enough,
by the end of President Hus visit, U.S. President Obama was celebrating the
$45 billion-worth of trade agreements signed during their meetings, including deals that amount to bonanzas for Boeing, General Electric, Cummins
253
Engine, and Honeywell.138 Chinas Peoples Daily, which had spent the
previous year fulminating about Western Imperialism, U.S. arrogance, and
the absurdity of human rights, suddenly found a happier tone, announcing
a new chapter of cooperation based upon mutual respect. The only hint
at the controversies addressed in this essay in the Chinese media was when
the Peoples Daily cautioned that Beijing and Washington should hold on
tight to their new consensus by protect[ing] their relationship from
negative influence by accidental and sporadic events.139 Some American
journalists did their best to prevent the White House press conference of
January 19, 2011 from descending into banal platitudes, but their questions
about contested human rights were met with boilerplate answers from the
2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner who, when pressed about the fate of the 2010
winner, said China has a different political system than we do. . . . We
come from very different cultures. . . . We can engage and discuss these
issues.140 The message was clear: containing North Korea, handling Iran,
monitoring Sudan, and making profts would take the lead, while expanding
human rights and democratic reforms would have to wait.
What the CCP hailed as President Hus message of harmony was
therefore based upon an agreed silence: the United States could enjoy
improved trade and military relations with China only by remaining
mum on human rights issues.141 This conditional version of international harmony echoes an ironic version of that term used by Chinas
democracy activists, who joke about being harmonized, meaning disappeared, arrested, or otherwise coerced into compliance with the
CCP.142 And so, like Chinas dissidentswhose hard work was dismissed in the Peoples Daily as accidental and sporadic events
President Obama has now been harmonized in the name of bringing jobs
to American voters and profts to American boardrooms. While extremists on both sides of the U.S. political spectrum hailed this news as
evidence of the presidents weakness (for the Right, he caved to Communists; for the Left, he caved to neoliberal capitalism), realists could
not blame President Obama for trying to make the best of a bad hand.143
For as I have shown here, the tensions between U.S.-style neoliberalism
and CCP-style totalitarian capitalism, and between those who support
universalist or particularist versions of human rights, have led to, and
will continue to produce, some awkward but necessary compromises.
254
By way of conclusion, I will review the lessons learned from this case
study, which may provide useful suggestions for working through the
tensions and compromises noted above. To do so, I return frst to the
question of human rights in an age of globalization, where it appears that
both the universalist and particularist camps are worthy but flawed starting
points. We have seen how the CCP bashes human rights as little more than
cover for Western imperialism, but it should be noted that the Partys fear of
the UDHR is based in part on a misunderstanding of its genesis, which in
fact included signifcant input from numerous developing nations. As Susan Waltz has shown, the document is not Western but global.144 In fact,
scholars have studied the debates leading to the formation of the UDHR and
concluded that Chinas representative at the founding meetings played a
crucial role in ensuring that the Confucian tradition was inscribed in the
opening article of the UDHR.145 Moreover, Tu Weiming reminds us that
the round of meetings leading up to the World Conference on Human
Rights, a June 1993 gathering meant to breathe new life into the UDHR,
included gatherings in Tunis, San Jos, and Bangkok, thus enabling the
participation of developing nations representing a wide range of religious,
ethnic, and cultural heritages.146 In sum, and precisely as Liu and his allies
argue, the charge that human rights are a form of Western cultural
imperialism falls apart under historical scrutiny.
At the same time, we also have seen that the CCP and its allies are not
wrong when they assert that the universalists in general and advocates of
Chinese New Enlightenment thinking in particular bear a crippling blind
spot regarding the shortcomings of contemporary human rights. Because of
their focus on securing legal individual rights, Henry Rosemont Jr. asserts,
such norms have served to obscure the wrongness of the radical maldistribution of the worlds wealth, leading to a Hobbesian world marked,
so Tu Weiming argues, by run-away acquisitive individualism, vicious
competitiveness, pernicious relativism, and excessive litigiousness.147 As
the CCP charges, and as the situation in many developing nations proves,
more rights does not necessarily mean more justice.
Rather than wielding antagonistic generalizations about universalist and
particularist versions of human rights, and allegedly Western versus
autonomous notions of cultural norms, my rhetorical analysis of Charter 08
suggests one possible route for constructing more fruitful dialogue: to
forego totalizing arguments about the foundational groundings and legal
255
claims of human rights to instead discuss the specifc thin rights that the
United States and China can agree upon. This would mean shifting the
argument from philosophical and legal grounds to rhetorical and political
grounds, to ask what is possible in China today? For Liu and his supporters, this shift in strategy would mean foregoing both prophetic rhetoric and
blistering diatribes to instead think more seriously about the means of
domestic rather than international persuasion, for no movement in China
can succeed without grassroots support. To be successful, this new rhetorical strategy would need to include at least these three components. First,
explaining to Chinas population how Confucian values, contrary to recent
Party efforts to turn Confucius into the philosopher of obedience, are
largely coterminous with the UDHR and other international documents.148
Second, rather than stoking fears of the turbulence many Chinese assume
will follow any rapid political transformation, the dissidents need to do a
better job of illustrating how their vision can unfold gradually and peacefully. Third, the dissidents would be wise to consider their position vis-a`-vis
Chinese nationalism, for no one is going to follow reformers whose vision is
widely seen as jeopardizing national unity and sovereignty, terms Martin
Jacques has called sacrosanct.149
For the Party and its supporters, the prudent rhetorical strategy suggested here would mean understanding that our age of globalization precludes the kinds of national exceptionalism China likes to claim as its
defense, for our networked interconnectivity means the Party can no longer
repress its citizens at home while trying to pursue a superpower position
abroad. As Rosemary Foot has argued, for China to make the transition
from its developing-country identity to its new great-power status, it
will need to start acting less like a fearful former colony and more like a
proud force of progress.150 In short, the global outpouring of anger following the Partys imprisonment of Liu demonstrates that China is not likely to
ascend to it desired role of global leadership without wielding a more subtle
version of what Joseph Nye calls soft power.151 While the Party appears
willing to spend billions of dollars on spectacles like the Beijing Olympics
and the Shanghai World Expo, my analysis of Charter 08 illustrates that the
worlds NGOs, liberal governments, and democracy activists believe that
such soft power will only blossom once free speech and human rights are
protected and valued in China. As a frst step toward achieving these goals,
256
the CCP could make no more powerful a statement than releasing Liu
Xiaobo from prison.
While this frst set of lessons follows from my analysis of human
rights discourse in an age of globalization, the second goal of this essay
was to examine the possible modes of artful dissent within China. Thus,
thinking rhetorically, I asked: if the CCP makes democracy a crime and
controls the public sphere so completely that no critics are allowed to be
heardthus creating the problem of representativitythen should we
appraise the arguments of Liu Xiaobo and his Charter 08 colleagues as
noble gestures likely to bring about political change or suicidal invitations to further repression? Can prophecies and diatribes work in the
Chinese context? My rhetorical analysis of Charter 08 suggests that the
paradoxical answer to this question is No for now but maybe Yes later.
This ambiguous answer follows because we have little hard evidence for
knowing when a state is about to undergo what Bruce Gilley calls a
democratic breakthrough, that moment when the old regime begins to
crumble and tabooed ideas suddenly look like answers. As the Arab
Spring illustrates so powerfully, the democratic breakthrough has no
frm timeline. Still, Gilley is hopeful that such a moment is fast approaching for China. When it arrives, he expects to see a moment of
backward legality, forward legitimacy, whereby the new leaders look
backward in history to draw upon the old states governing mechanisms
even as they look forward in history to create a new regime based on
more democratic principles. Specifcally not revolutionary in the sense
of hoping to avoid a blood bath, such a transitional interim regime
might be able to govern while also transforming society.152 If and when
such a moment comes, Liu Xiaobos decades-long record of principled
opposition and the courage of his Charter 08 coauthors will stand as
strong evidence that they should be among the central players. Some
critics of this notion will charge that it is utopian at best, or dangerous at
worst, yet as we have seen in South Africa with Nelson Mandela, in
Poland with Lech Walesa, in Czechoslovakia (and then the Czech Republic) with Vclav Havel, in Myanmar with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi,
and with a number of leaders across the Arab Spring landscape, yesterdays political prisoners and exiles may well become tomorrows leaders.
Prophetic rhetoric that once felt too grand, and diatribes that once felt
too acerbic, may suddenly seem commonsensical.
257
While the frst set of suggestions points to modifed human rights discourse in an age of globalization, and the second set speaks to the range of
options for producing more artful arguments for democracy in China, I will
close this essay by reviewing the lessons learned in the third and, I believe,
most important part of the essay. For in addressing the global outpouring of
support for Liu Xiaobo and Charter 08 alongside the Partys response, we
saw that arguments about human rights and democracy in an age of globalization hinge in large part on questions of national narrativeswho speaks
for the heart and soul of the nation? Whose claims resonate not only as
reasonable but as offering a sense of dignity and nobility? At the most basic
level, this question may be broken down into two parallel sub-questions.
First, is the Partys fear of democratization a prudent response to a fragile
nation wracked for centuries by internal turmoil and foreign meddling, or a
cynical excuse to linger in power? Second, do those advocates who demand
immediate reform based on Western principles underestimate the possible
complexities of a transition toward democracy, or do they have their fnger
on the subterranean pulse of Chinas vast democracy-hungry population?
In sum, and thinking in terms of a national narrativea grand arc of
explanation and justifcationthe third part of the essay wondered whether
China should err on the side of preserving existing national arrangements in
the name of harmony and stability, or on the side of opening up to
global pressure for more human rights and enhanced democratic practices?
The preliminary answer I would like to venture hereadding a rhetorical twist to Gilleys notion of backward legality, forward legitimacyis to
argue that the CCP needs Liu and his Charter 08 colleagues to supply the
nation with the grand vision it now lacks. Whereas Confucianism, Imperial
Grandeur, and Communism served for generations as guiding principles,
they have been compromised in the post-Mao dive into consumer decadence, leaving the nation awash in what Yang Jisheng calls a moral vacuum, what Gilley calls a social malaise, and what Shiping Hua calls
Chinas morality crisis.153 Even Perry Anderson, one of the leading international proponents of leftist politics, has noted that Chinas consumer
nationalism is a shallow ideological construct, particularly when coupled
with ongoing political repression, meaning that the CCP desperately needs
to provide more meaningful and ennobling justifcations for its continued
rule.154 Arif Dirlik put it bluntly when he stated that Chinese socialism
justifes itself in terms of a historical vision that has no apparent relevance to
258
the present.155 In short, in an age of networked global neoliberalism, the

combination of brute repression and manic capitalism provides no narrative for rallying the nation or foreign allies.156 In this regard, even though
Charter 08 is currently outlawed and its authors imprisoned, the text could,
once the process of democratic breakthrough gains momentum, offer
contemporary China precisely what it is lacking: fresh intellectual grounds
for justifying the nations ongoing attempts to reclaim its ancient role as one
of the worlds great powers and beacons of civilization. Realists may claim
that hoping for this rhetorical and political breakthrough is foolish, yet it
is precisely what happened with Martin Luther King Jr., Mandela, Walesa,
Havel, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi; in each case, the formerly imprisoned
dissidents prophetic rhetoric became valorized because it offered a confused nation a much-needed sense of mission. Working in that tradition,
perhaps Liu Xiaobo and the other authors Charter 08 may yet draft a vision
of China that situates it at the forefront of the global march away from
dictatorship and toward representative and transparent governance.
At the same time, even the most impatient of the democracy advocates
must realize that they need the Partys immense institutional apparatus if
they hope to govern with any semblance of competence, for while the
nations 1.5 billion peoplean astonishing 20 percent of the Earths populationrequire freedom, they also need a professional government capable
of maintaining order and delivering the goods of daily life. As the events in
Tunisia, Syria, and Egypt since 2011 illustrate so painfully, grassroots movements hoping to topple dictators often open the floodgates of generationsworth of pent-up anger; where that energy leads, once unleashed, is
anyones guess. As the heart-breaking situations in post-Hussein Iraq,
post-Taliban Afghanistan, and post-authoritarian Indonesia demonstrate,
building functioning democracies in fractured nations with totalitarian
histories can be harrowing, if not impossible. Once the dictators leave,
democracy is not a given.157
The CCP and the democracy advocates therefore need each other: the
Party needs the prophetic vision of the democracy advocates while the
activists imagined new order will need the Party to provide stability and
prevent chaos. In this way, prophecy and prudence can combine forces.
Until that day comes, Chinese dissidents and Party members, U.S. leaders
and activists, and international NGOs should heed Xing Lus claim that the
crucial challenge ahead is to build trust and cooperation between China
259
and the United States.158 The question of how to work toward trust remains
fraught for all of the stakeholders addressed herein; still, Liu Xiaobo and his
Charter 08 allies have created a global opportunity for pondering a different
future.
NOTES
1. On Lius disappearance, see Phelim Kine, Free Liu Xiaobo, Human Rights Watch,
July 13, 2009, http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/07/13/free-liu-xiaobo (accessed October
23, 2012).
2. The trials brevity is noted in Larry Siems, World Awaits Verdict in Liu Xiaobo
Trial, PEN American Center, December 23, 2009, http://www.pen.org/
viewmedia.php/prmMID/4450/prmID/172 (accessed October 23, 2012); also see
Andrew Jacobs, Trial in China Signals Attack on Dissidents, New York Times,
December 24, 2009, A1, 10.
3. The CCP as quoted in Geoff Dyer, Chinese Dissident Wins Award, Financial Times,
October 9, 2010, 2; for background, see Rosemary Foot, Rights Beyond Borders: The
Global Community and the Struggle over Human Rights in China (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
4. See Scott R. Stroud, Selling Democracy and the Rhetorical Habits of Synthetic
Conflict: John Dewey as Pragmatic Rhetor in China, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 16
(2013): 97132; Rya Butterfeld, Rhetorical Forms of Symbolic Labor: The Evolution
of Iconic Representations in Chinas Model Worker Awards, Rhetoric & Public
Affairs 15 (2012): 95125, and Michelle Murray Yang, President Nixons Speeches
and Toasts During His 1972 Trip to China: A Study in Diplomatic Rhetoric, Rhetoric
& Public Affairs 14 (2011): 144. These R&PA articles, and the others cited
throughout this essay, stand at the forefront of what is about to be a seismic shift in
communication scholarship, as Asia in general and China in particular are about to
become major players, if not global leaders, in the communication discipline; see Hao
Xiaoming, Asian Journal of Communication: Communication Research with an
Asian Focus for a Global Audience, Review of Communication 12 (2012): 25766.
5. tienne Balibar, Europe, an Unimagined Frontier of Democracy, diacritics 33
(2003): 37; on the dilemmas of globalization noted here, see Frederic Jameson and
Masao Miyoshi, eds., The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1998); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2002); and William Greider, One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of
Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
260
6. The verdict was given on December 25, 2009. For the text, see The Criminal Verdict:
Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Peoples Court Criminal Judgment No. 3901, in Liu
Xiabo, No Enemies, No HatredSelected Essays and Poems, ed. Perry Link, Tienchi
Martin-Liao, and Liu Xia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 338.
7. D. Robert DeChaine, Humanitarian Space and the Social Imaginary: Mdecins Sans
Frontires/Doctors Without Borders and the Rhetoric of Global Community,
Journal of Communication Inquiry 26 (2002): 354; also see Raka Shome and Radha S.
Hegde, Culture, Communication, and the Challenge of Globalization, Critical
Studies in Media Communication 19 (2002): 17289.
8. Among the many scholars making this claim, see Amy Chua, World on Fire: How
Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New
York: Anchor, 2004), where she argues that the global spread of markets and
democracy is a principal, aggravating cause of group hatred and ethnic violence
throughout the non-Western world (9). Whereas Chua focuses on the effects
globalization brings to unstable domestic situations, David Harvey argues in The New
Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), that globalization can only
be understood as Americanization (41), which triggers nationalist backlashes from
those who perceive this process as an affront to local traditions.
9. H. Con. Res. 151, 111th Cong. (2009), 30. The resolution passed the House on October 1,
2009, roughly two months before Lius conviction was announced, beta.congress.
gov/bill/111th-congress/house-concurrent-resolution/151 (accessed October 23, 2012).
10. Jiang Yu quoted in Most Nations Oppose Peace Prize to Liu, China Daily,
December 10, 2010, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/china/2010-12/10/
content_11682920.htm (accessed October 23, 2012); for a view of prior human rights
debates that is favorable to the CCPs position, see Mei-Ling Wang, Humanism and
Human Rights: A Comparison between the Occidental and Oriental Traditions, in
Chinese Communication Studies: Contexts and Comparisons, ed. Xing Lu, Wenshan
Jia, and D. Ray Heisey (Westport, CT: Ablex, 2002), 18196.
11. This turn of events in U.S.-China communication patterns offers a contrast to the
model offered in Xing Lu and Herbert W. Simons Transitional Rhetoric of Chinese
Communist Party Leaders in the Post-Mao Reform Period: Dilemmas and Strategies,
Quarterly Journal of Speech 92 (2006): 26286; it is echoed, however, in Stephen John
Hartnett, Google and the Twisted Cyber Spy Affair: U.S.-China Communication in
an Age of Globalization, Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 41134.
12. Leonard C. Hawes, Human Rights and an Ethic of truths: Pragmatic Dilemmas and
Discursive Interventions, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7 (2010):
262.
261
13. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, ed. Amy Gutmann
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 58.
14. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2010), 84119.
15. Qian Si, A Criticism of the Views of Bourgeois International Law (1960) in The
Chinese Human Rights Reader, ed. Stephen C. Angle and Marina Svennson (Armonk,
NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 242. For the template that would set the tone for later hard
Left critiques of human rights, see Karl Marxs 1843 essay On the Jewish Question,
in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977), 3957, which includes his argument that under the French and
American revolutions, and their corresponding rights regimes, Man was therefore
not freed from religion: he received freedom of religion. He was not freed from
property; he received freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of trade;
he received freedom to trade (56). For Marx in 1843, as for the CCP today, human
rights are bourgeois puffery.
16. Wu Miaofa, Peace Prize Ignores its Ideals, China Daily, December 13, 2010,
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/2010-12/13/content_11692787.htm (accessed
October 23, 2012).
17. Xiao Weiyun, Luo Haocai, and Wu Xieyung, How Marxism Views the Human
Rights Question (1979) in The Chinese Human Rights Reader, 283.
18. Liu Huaqiu, Vienna Conference Statement, (1993) in The Chinese Human Rights
Reader, 39293.
19. Wang Jisi, Understanding Strategic Distrust: The Chinese Side, in Addressing
U.S.-China Strategic Distrust, ed. Kenneth Lieberthal and Wang Jisi (Washington,
DC: Brookings Institution/John L. Thornton China Center, 2012), 11.
20. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 74.
21. Gerard A. Hauser, The Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse, Philosophy
and Rhetoric 41 (2008): 455.
22. Regarding this clash between universal and particular versions of human rights, see
Jack Donnelly Cultural Relativism and Universal Human Rights, Human Rights
Quarterly 6 (1984): 40019, and Kenneth Cmiel, The Recent History of Human
Rights, American Historical Review 109 (2004): 11735.
23. Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry, 21, 53, 75; and see Hauser, The
Moral Vernacular of Human Rights Discourse, and Hawes, Human Rights and an
Ethic of truths.
262
24. Diane F. Orentlicher, Relativism and Religion, in Human Rights as Politics and
Idolatry, 147; David A. Hollinger, Debates with PTA and Others, in Human Rights
as Politics and Idolatry, 122.
25. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Reflections by Nobel Laureates, in The Universal
Declaration of Human Rights: Fifty Years and Beyond, ed. Yael Danieli, Elsa
Stamatopouluo, and Clarence J. Dias (Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing, 1999),
xiii.
26. Liu Xiaobo Standing Amid the Execrations of Time (1999) in No Enemies, No
Hatred, 17, 18.
27. In using the term diatribe, I am recalling the work of Theodore Otto Windt Jr., who
argued during the Vietnam War that activists who feel shut out from public debate
turn as a last resort to the diatribe, a form of scandalous and scandalizing rhetoric
meant to profane social custom, assault sensibilities, and reduce conventional
beliefs to the ridiculous. See The Diatribe: Last Resort for Protest, Quarterly
Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 114, quotations from 6, 7, 8.
28. PEN Centers circle the globe and are active in 31 nations; see the complete list at
http://www.pen.org (accessed October 23, 2012).
29. For a timeline of events, see Liu Xiaobo: A Chronology of Activism, posted by
Human Rights in China (hereafter HRIC) at http://www.hrichina.org/crf/article/3196
(accessed October 23, 2012); also see Link, Introduction, in No Enemies, No Hatred,
xiiixxii.
30. See the information about the National Endowment for Democracy available from
their website, www.ned.org; on the roles USAID plays in fueling crony capitalism in
post-9/11 international politics, see Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim,
Globalization & Empire: The U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Free Markets, and the Twilight of
Democracy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 21266.
31. Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and
Letters (New York: New Press, 1999), 2.
32. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II
(Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995), 303, 315.
33. Liu has been a long-time admirer of Havel, as seen in his letter to Liao Yiwu, January
13, 2000 (posted online by HRIC), in which he wrote of Chinas needing to produce a
righteous giant like Havel; for a Tiananmen-era precursor to Charter 08, see the
Chinese Human Rights Movement Committees 1989 Declaration of Human
Rights, in Chinese Human Rights Reader, 32123.
34. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10, 1948) is available from the
U.N., http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ (accessed October 23, 2012); and see
263
Danieli, Stamatopouluo, and Dias, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Fifty
Years and Beyond.
35. Liu Xiaobo and others, Chinas Charter 08, trans. Perry Link, New York Review of
Books, January 15, 2009, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jan/15/
chinas-charter-08 (accessed October 23, 2012). Reprinted in No Enemies, No Hatred,
30012. All subsequent page numbers for Charter 08 are from the version reprinted in
No Enemies, No Hatred.
36. The Democracy Wall movement flourished in Beijing from December 1978 through
April 1979, when Chinese citizens plastered the walls of the city with political posters
demanding more freedoms. The movement was crushed by Deng Xiaoping who, in
1979, arrested hundreds of activists and sentenced one of the movements leaders,
Wei Jingsheng, to 15 years in prison. For photographs of these events, and Weis
version of what happened, see his The Courage to Stand Alone: Letters from Prison
and Other Writings, trans. Kristina M. Torgeson (New York: Penguin, 1998); also see
Orville Schell, The Democracy Wall Movement, in The China Reader: The Reform
Era, ed. Orville Schell and David Shambaugh (New York: Vintage, 1999), 15765, and
Marina Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China (Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefeld, 2002), 23654.
37. Charter 08, 3012.
38. Charter 08, 303.
39. Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007),
147, 160; and see Moyn, Last Utopia, for a similar overview.
40. Perry Link, China: From Famine to Oslo, New York Review of Books, January 13,
2011, 52; on the Partys chronic insecurity, see Zan Aizong, The Chinese Communist
Party Prepares for the 60th Anniversary Celebration: Nervous as an Army Going to
Battle, China Rights Forum (2009 no. 3), http://www.hrichina.org/crf/article/3820
(accessed October 23, 2012).
41. Wang Hui, Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity, trans.
Rebecca E. Karl, Social Text 55 (1998): 18.
42. Charter 08, 3034.
43. Charter 08, 304.
44. James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York:
New York University Press, 1997), 22.
45. Stephen E. Lucas, The Rhetorical Ancestry of the Declaration of Independence,
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 1 (1998): 144, 150.
46. For representative critiques of Chinas move toward capitalism, see Jehangir S. Pocha,
Letter from Beijing, The Nation, May 9, 2005, 2224; He Qinglian, The Chinese
264

Government Degenerates into a Self-Interested Political Clique, China Rights Forum
(2009, no. 3), http://www.hrichina.org/crf/article/3821 (accessed October 23, 2012);
and Tania Branigan, Chinas Rural Poor Left Stranded as Urbanites Race Ahead,
Guardian (London), October 3, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/oct/03/
china-rural-poor-left-stranded (accessed October 23, 2012).
47. For an introduction to these issues, see Human Rights in China, China: Minority
Exclusion, Marginalization, and Rising Tensions (London: Minority Rights Group
International, 2007); for the Partys perspective, see Lan Xinzhen, Chinas West:
Generating Change, China Today, April 2011, 4749.
48. Charter 08, 304.
49. Susan L. Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
262.
50. For typical examples of angry attacks against the Party, see Larry Siems and Yu
Zhang, PEN Renews Calls for Liu Xiaobos Release, PEN American Center,
December 7, 2009, http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/4390 (accessed
October 23, 2012); and Larry Siems, PEN President Appiah Calls Sentencing of Liu
Xiaobo a Mockery and a Scandal, PEN American Center, December 25, 2009.
http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/4451 (accessed October 23, 2012); the
sentence is from The Criminal Verdict: Beijing No. 1 Intermediate Peoples Court
Criminal Judgment No. 3901.
51. Charter 08, 304.
52. Charter 08, 304.
53. The quoted passage is from the closing sentence of Abraham Lincolns November 19,
1863, Gettysburg Address, http://www.americancivilwar.com/north/lincoln.html
54. Wei Jingshengs letter of November 9, 1983 is reprinted in Courage to Stand Alone,
77.
55. Fei-Ling Wang, Stuck in Panic Mode, New York Times, February 28, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/02/28/why-is-china-nervous-about-thearab-uprisings/stuck-in-panic-mode (accessed October 23, 2012).
56. Charter 08, 305.
57. The National Human Rights Action Plan is noted by Kine in Free Liu Xiaobo; on
the Partys post-Tiananmen efforts to burnish its reputation regarding human rights,
see John H. Powers, Civic Discourse with the International Community: Chinas
Whitepapers on Human Rights, in Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese
Communities, ed. Randy Kluver and John H. Powers (Stamford, CT: Ablex, 1999)
23750.
265
58. The fgure of over 10,000 signatories is cited in numerous sources included herein,
including in Eleven Year Jail Sentence for Free Speech Activist Liu Xiaobo,
Reporters Without Borders, December 25, 2009, via Refworld, the online data-base of
the Offce of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
http://www.refworld.org/docid/4b38b6ca2c.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
59. The Criminal Verdict, No Enemies, No Hatred, hits noted on 33435.
60. Jia Qinglin quoted in Ariana Eunjung Cha, In China, A Grassroots Rebellion,
Washington Post, January 29, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2009/01/28/AR2009012803886.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
61. Richardson is quoted in Liu Xiaobos Trial a Travesty of Justice, Human Rights
Watch, December 21, 2009, http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/12/21/china-liu-xiaobo-strial-travesty-justice (accessed October 23, 2012).
62. Wei Jingshengs charge is from his August 25, 1981 letter to the Party, sent from jail,
in Courage to Stand Alone, 3.
63. Charter 08, 309.
64. For primers on Taiwan and Hong Kong, see the essays collected in Suzanne Ogden,
ed., Global Studies: China, 14th ed. (Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 16576; on
Taiwan, see Shirk, Fragile Superpower, 181211, and Martin Jacques, When China
Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order
(New York: Penguin, 2009), where he calls Taiwan the great non-negotiable (299).
65. On the signifcance of Tibet to Chinas larger ambitions, see Melvyn C. Goldstein, The
Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997); Abrahm Lustgarten, Chinas Great Train: Beijings Drive West
and the Campaign to Remake Tibet (New York: Times Books, 2008); and Kenneth
Pomeranz, The Great Himalayan Watershed, New Left Review 58 (2009),
http://www.newleftreview.org/II/58/kenneth-pomeranz-the-great-himalayan-watershed
(accessed October 23, 2012); the Tibetan position is outlined in Tsering Shakya, The
Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947 (New York:
Penguin, 1999).
66. On Macaos fortunes, see the CIAs collection of resources, www.cia.gov/library/
publications/the-world-factbook/geos/mc.html (accessed October 23, 2012); Hong
Kong references are offered in note 64.
67. The situation in the west is so dire that Susan K. McCarthy argues in The State,
Minorities, and Dilemmas of Development in Contemporary China, Fletcher Forum
of World Affairs 26 (2002): 10718, that economic modernization and socio-cultural
destruction appear inextricable (109).
266
68. Who is Liu Xiaobo? Peoples Daily Online, October 28, 2010, http://english.
people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7180372.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
69. China Will Not be Fooled, China Tibet Online, October 24, 2010,
chinatibet.people.com.cn/7175421.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
70. Xinhua News Agency quotation from Nobel Committee Harbors Political Motives,
December 9, 2010, http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-12/09/
c_13642744.htm (accessed October 23, 2012).
71. Windt, Diatribe, 9.
72. To demonstrate the position of the Party on such matters, I will confess that while in
Beijing in the summer of 2010, when I pestered a Party offcial about the prospects of
freeing Tibet, she responded, in perfect pitch, when you Americans give back Texas
and Hawaii, then well talk. Liu fears the Han patriotism noted here will lead China
to pursue aggressive, and perhaps dangerous, political commitmentssee Bellicose
and Thuggish: The Roots of Chinese Patriotism at the Dawn of the Twenty-First
Century (2002) in No Enemies, No Hatred, 81.
73. Tibets chief spokesperson in this regard is the Dalai Lama, whose arguments are
accessible at http://www.dalailama.com (accessed October 23, 2012); the most
prominent spokesperson for Xinjiang is Rebiya Kadeer, who was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize in 2006see A Voice for the Uyghurs, China Rights Forum
(2006, no. 4): 5859; additional materials on both situations are archived by the
International Freedom of Expression Exchange (http://www.ifex.org) and by Refworld
(http://www.unhcr.org), both accessed October 23, 2012.
74. Charter 08, 910; and see Vera Schwarcz, Memory and Commemoration: The
Chinese Search for a Livable Past, in Popular Protest & Political Culture in Modern
China, 2nd ed., ed. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry (Boulder: Westview,
1994), 17083.
75. Yiyun Li, The Vagrants (New York: Random House, 2009), 83, 327.
76. Charter 08, 309; Jung Chang and Jon Halliday argue in Mao: The Unknown Story
(New York: Anchor, 2006), that the death toll during Maos reign was well over 70
million (3); for a novelistic account of these dark days, see Zhang Xianliang, Grass
Soup, trans. Martha Avery (Boston: David R. Godine, 1995).
77. Evan Osnos, Meet Dr. Freud: Does Psychoanalysis Have a Future in an
Authoritarian State? The New Yorker, January 10, 2011, 63.
78. For examples of such memory work in action, see Facing June Fourth, a special
issue of China Rights Forum (2009, no. 2); Zhang, Grass Soup; Li, The Vagrants; and
Liao Yiwu, The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up, trans.
Wen Huang (New York: Anchor Books, 2008).
267
79. Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New
York: Routledge, 2001), 185; also see Erik Doxtader, With Faith in the Works of
Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 19851995 (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2009).
80. Michael Dutton, Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo, and Dong Dong Wu, Beijing Time (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 208, 113.
81. Charter 08, 30910.
82. Tang quoted in Cha, In China, A Grassroots Rebellion.
83. Link, China: From Famine to Oslo, 56.
84. Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party (Gillette, NJ: The Epoch Times, 2004),
34, 139these articles appeared originally in Chinese in Daijiyuan and in English in
The Epoch Times (http://www.theepochtimes.com/news/4-12-1/24696.html), which is
affliated with the banned Falun Gong movement. (Accessed October 23, 2012).
85. An Chen, Capitalist Development, Entrepreneurial Class, and Democratization in
China, Political Science Quarterly 117 (2002): 417 (emphasis added).
86. Andrew Kirkpatrick, Yin and Yang Rhetoric and the Impossibility of Constructive
Dissent in China, African Yearbook of Rhetoric 3 (2012): 44, 46.
87. Geoff Dyer and Jamil Anderlini, Nation Voices Pride and Outrage, Financial Times,
October 9, 2010, 7.
88. On the history of previous imprisoned Nobel recipients, see Bjoern H. Aland and
Matti Huuhtanen, Liu Xiaobo Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony Goes Ahead with Empty
Chair, Associated Press, October 10, 2010, accessed via The Huffngton Post, http://
www.huffngtonpost.com/2010/12/10/liu-xiaobo-nobel-peace-pr_2_n_794850.html
(accessed October 23, 2012); Liu Xias house arrest is noted in Sharon LaFraniere,
Wife of Nobel Laureate Invites Scores of Chinese Activists to Oslo, New York Times,
October 27, 2010, A10.
89. Op. Ed., Honoring Liu Xiaobo, New York Times, November 19, 2010,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/20/opinion/20sat2.html (accessed October 23, 2012);
on Sakharovs signifcance, see Moyn, Last Utopia, 13556.
90. Michael Wines, Cables Reveal Early Tensions Between U.S. and China on Nobel
Winner, New York Times, December 9, 2010, A10.
91. On the boycott, see Tania Branigan, Eighteen More Countries Refuse to Attend
Nobel Peace Prize Ceremony, Guardian (London), December 7, 2010, http://www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/07/china-nobel-peace-prize-clowns (accessed October
23, 2012); on the economic reasons driving the boycotters, see Praveen Swami, Nobel
Peace Prize Boycott is Blow to US Prestige, The Telegraph, December 7, 2010,
268

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8186999/Nobel-Peace-prizeboycott-is-blow-to-US-prestige.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
92. The Welt am Sonntags line is quoted in Alan Cowell, Freedom in Era of the Empty
Chair; Letter from Europe, International Herald Tribune, December 18, 2010, 2; on
Chinas attempts to build an international network of like-minded regimes, see
Chinas Strategic Global Influence, China Rights Forum (2005, no. 3): 2127.
93. Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How Chinas Authoritarian Model will
Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 208note that
while the actions discussed herein postdate Halpers claims, they confrm his thesis.
94. Frank Ching, Empty Words, South China Morning Post, May 4, 2011, 13.
95. Will Hutton, China is a Bubble about to Burst, New Zealand Herald, December 15,
2010, http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id466&objectid
10694328 (accessed October 23, 2012); Lien Chan and following quotation from Peter
Foster, Confucius Prize? Never Heard of It, Says the Winner, Daily Telegraph,
December 9, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/8191835/
Nobel-Peace-Prize-Confucius-prize-Never-heard-of-it-says-the-winner.html (accessed
October 23, 2012).
96. Liu Xiaobo, To Change a Regime by Changing Society, (2006) in No Enemies, No
Hatred, 24.
97. Nobel Prize Has Nothing to do with Peace, China Tibet Online, October 25, 2010,
chinatibet.people.com.cn/7175915.html (accessed October 23, 2012, but originally
printed in China Daily on October 24, 2010); A Nobel Peace Prize or a Trick? China
Tibet Online, October 13, 2010, chinatibet.people.com.cn/7164787.html (accessed
October 23, 2012).
98. Beijing Blasts Nobel Peace Prize Meddling, Peoples Daily Online, October 9, 2010,
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90882/7160366.html (accessed October 23,
2012); for additional attacks on Liu and the award, see Nobel Peace Prize Goes
Astray Politically, Peoples Daily Online, October 18, 2010, http://english.
people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/7169324.html (accessed October 23, 2012); Nobel
Peace Prize Politically Distorted, Peoples Daily Online, October 19, 2010,
http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/7170896.html (accessed October 23,
2012); and West Risks Its Own Fall with Arrogance, Peoples Daily Online, October
12, 2010, http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90780/91343/7162863.html
99. What Can be Inferred from Awarding Nobel Peace Prize to Dalai Lama and Liu
Xiaobo? China Tibet Online, October 13, 2010, chinatibet.people.com.cn/
269
7164767.html (accessed October 23, 2012); many of the stories found on the China
Tibet Online site used the Liu situation to attack the Dalai Lama.
100. Regarding these time-worn tropes, see George Q. Xu, The Role of Rhetorical Topoi
in Constructing the Social Fabric of Contemporary China, in Kluver and Powers,
Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese Communities, 4151, and Xing Lu, From
Ideological Enemies to Strategic Partners: A Rhetorical Analysis of U.S.-China
Relations in Intercultural Contexts, Howard Journal of Communications 22 (2011):
33657.
101. The restaurant ban is reported in Tania Branigan, China Cracks Down on Activists,
Guardian (London), December 9, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/
09/china-cracks-down-activists/print (accessed October 23, 2012).
102. Doug Saunders and Mark Mackinnon, An Empty Chair, A Deep Divide, Globe and
Mail, December 11, 2010, A27; on netizens in Asia, see Jiyeon Kang, Coming to
Terms with Unreasonable Global Power: The 2002 South Korean Candlelight
Vigils, Communication and Critica/Cultural Studies 6 (2009): 17192.
103. Li Rui et al., Open Letter, translated and posted by David Bandurski, October 13,
2010, China Media Project website, http://cmp.hku.hk/2010/10/13/8035/ (accessed
October 23, 2012); see Premier Wen Jiabaos comments in an October 3, 2010,
interview with CNNs Fareed Zakaria, on his Global Public Square show,
www.cnn.com/video/#/video/podcasts/fareedzakaria/site/2010/10/03/gps.podcast.
10.03.cnn (accessed October 23, 2012).
104. See Chinese Veteran Politicians Call for Reform, BBC News/Asia-Pacifc, October
13, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacifc-11529920 (accessed October
23, 2012); also see Michael Wines, Retired Communist Party Leaders Join in a
Demand for Press Freedom in China, New York Times, October 14, 2010, A5.
105. China & the Nobel, National Post, December 9, 2010, A17; A Nobel Blunder,
Daily Telegraph, December 11, 2010, 31.
106. Verna Yu, Liu Supporters in Oslo Rally on Eve of Nobel Ceremony, South China
Morning Post, December 10, 2010, 4.
107. Premier Wens visit is discussed in David Barboza, Chinese Are Encouraged to
Criticize Government by the Premier, New York Times, January 27, 2011, A9.
108. Xus comments are printed as Remarks by Vclav Havel and Two Members of
Chinas Charter 08 at the Ceremony for the Homo Homini Award, in an online
supplement to the New York Review of Books, April 30, 2009, http://www.nybooks.
com/articles/archives/2009/apr/30/remarks-by-vaclav-havel-and-two-members-ofchinas-/ (accessed October 23, 2012); the One World Human Rights Film Festival can
270

be accessed at www.oneworld.cz/ow/2009/index2.php?id591 (accessed October 23,
2012).
109. Xus peaceful evolution line is quoted in Calum MacLeod, In China, Echoes of the
Crackdown, USA Today, June 4, 2009, http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/200906-03-china_N.htm (accessed October 23, 2012).
110. Xu, Remarks by Vclav Havel and Two Members of Chinas Charter 08.
111. A Nobel Peace Prize to Celebrate, Financial Times, October 9, 2010, 6.
112. Xu, Remarks by Vclav Havel and Two Members of Chinas Charter 08; Xu has
suffered the consequences of his views, as reported in David Stanway, Beijing Strikes
at Dissident, The Observer, January 4, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/
jan/04/china-human-rights-charter-08 (accessed October 23, 2012).
113. We are Willing to Share Responsibility with Liu Xiaobo, ICPC, December 10, 2009,
http://www.chinainperspective.com/ArtShow.aspx?AID3976&ModeENG (accessed
October 23, 2012).
114. On the political prisoners noted here, see Human Rights Watch, China: Sham Trial
of Veteran Human Rights Activist, November 23, 2009, http://www.unhcr.org/cgibin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid4b138dd41e (accessed October 23, 2012); and
Committee to Protect Journalists, Annual Prison Census 2009, China, December 8,
2009, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid4b220ca228
115. Let Them Know the Will of the People Cannot be Cowed, an HRIC interview with
Ding Zilin, December 16, 2009, http://www.hrichina.org/content/355 (accessed
October 23, 2012); on Dings efforts with the Tiananmen Mothers group, see
http://www.fllthesquare.org (accessed October 23, 2012); also see the materials offered
in the June Fourth Memorial Archive, http://iso.hrichina.org (accessed October 23,
2012).
116. Svensson, Debating Human Rights in China, 311.
117. Zhao Yan, Sixty Years: Pervasive Dictatorship Propaganda, Limited Press Freedom,
China Rights Forum (2009, no. 3), http://www.hrichina.org/crf/article/3825 (accessed
October 23, 2012); Bruce Gilley echoes this charge in Chinas Democratic Future: How
it will Happen and Where it will Lead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004),
where he argues that the CCPs continued rule has become a living lie (33).
118. Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, 81.
119. Liu Xiaobo, Atop a Volcano, China Rights Forum (2005, no. 1): 39; and see Gordon
G. Chang, The Partys Over: Chinas Endgame, World Affairs (March/April 2010),
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/article/partys-over-chinas-endgame (accessed
October 23, 2012).
271
120. Liu Xiaobo, The Many Aspects of the CPC Dictatorship, Human Rights in China,
March 13, 2006, http://www.hrichina.org/crf/article/3198 (accessed October 23, 2012).
121. In a 1998 poem, Liu made similar claims, arguing that the Chinese people live
without a shred of human dignity because they have been trained by the Party in the
ways of opportunism, hypocrisy, apathy, frivolity, humiliation, groveling
impotence, and chicanery; see Lui Xiaobo,On Living with Dignity in China, in
No Enemies, No Hatred, 128, 129.
122. Xing Lu, Rhetoric of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Impact on Chinese Thought,
Culture, and Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004),
193, and see 15281 for other examples of this pattern.
123. Liu Xiaobo, Further Questions about Child Slavery in Chinas Kilns, China Rights
Forum (2007, no. 4): 81, 86.
124. Liu Xiaobo, That Holy Word, Revolution, frst published in 1994 in Wasserstrom
and Perry, Popular Protest & Political Culture in Modern China, 30924, but also
available at http://www.tsquare.tv/links/LiuXiaobo.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
125. Liu, That Holy Word.
126. Wei Jingsheng letter to Zemin, June 15, 1991, in Courage to Stand Alone, 170.
127. Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, 35.
128. Lius letter is quoted in Perry Link, What Beijing Fears Most, New York Review of
Books, January 27, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/jan/27/whatbeijing-fears-most/ (accessed October 23, 2012); for a celebration of such heroism, see
Nicholas Kristoff, Liu Xiaobo and Chinese Democracy, New York Times, October 8,
2010, http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/liu-xiaobo-and-chinese-democracy/
129. Darsey, Prophetic Tradition, 33.
130. Liu Xiaobo, Letter to Liao Yiwu (2000) in No Enemies, No Hatred, 289.
131. The expectation of ritual propriety is noted in Jess Sol-Farra`s, Harmony in
Contemporary New Confucianism and in Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,
China Media Research 4 (2008): 16; Xu, The Role of Rhetorical Topoi in
Constructing the Social Fabric of Contemporary China, 49.
132. Ling Chen, Revolution and Us: A Cultural Rendition of Political Movements in
Contemporary China, in Lu, Jia, and Heisey, Chinese Communication Studies,
2223.
133. Randy Kluver, Elite-Based Discourse in Chinese Civil Society, in Civic Discourse,
Civil Society, and Chinese Communities, 17.
134. Richard B. Gregg, The Ego-Function of the Rhetoric of Protest, Philosophy and
Rhetoric 4 (1971): 7191.
272
135. Liu Xiaobo, The Internet is Gods Present to China, Times (London), April 28,
2009, 24.
136. Butterfeld, Rhetorical Forms of Symbolic Labor, 96.
137. Helene Cooper and Mark Landler, U.S. Shifts Focus to Press Chinese to Open
Markets, New York Times, January 19, 2011, A1, 6.
138. The deals are detailed in Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mark Landler, Obama and Hu Cite
Mutual Aims Amid Trade Deals, New York Times, January 19, 2011,
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/obama-hu-cite-mutual-aims-assummit-starts/ (accessed October 23, 2012); and see the offcial U.S.-China Joint
Statement, WhiteHouse.gov, January 19, 2011, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffce/2011/01/19/us-china-joint-statement (accessed October 23, 2012).
139. For the Partys triumphant coverage of Hus visit, see the articles printed under the
header of President Hu Visits the United States, Jan. 18 Jan. 21, 2011,
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english2010/special/hjt20110118/ (accessed October 23,
2012).
140. Press Conference with President Obama and President Hu of the Peoples Republic
of China, WhiteHouse.gov, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-offce/2011/01/19/
press-conference-president-obama-and-president-hu-peoples-republic-china (accessed
October 23, 2012); despite his tepid answers at this session, the president has been
getting good advice from Chinese dissidents, as recounted in Li Xiaorong, What I
Told Obama About Beijings Human Rights Problem, New York Review of Books,
January 18, 2011, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2011/jan/18/obama-chinahuman-rights-problem/ (accessed October 23, 2012).
141. The CCPs trope of harmony is evident in the stories listed in note 139; on the
Chinese understanding of harmony, see Stephen C. Angle, Human Rights in Chinese
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 22939, and Sol-Farra`s,
Harmony in Contemporary New Confucianism.
142. On being harmonized, see Jamil Anderlini and David Pilling, Man in the News: Ai
Weiwei, Financial Times, November 12, 2010, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b130bcd8ee90-11df-9db0-00144feab49a.html (accessed October 23, 2012).
143. Republicans like to pretend that Chinas rise is attributable to U.S. leaders not being
tough enough, as seen in Anna Censky, Romney Talks Tough on China,
CNNMoney, October 19, 2011, http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/06/news/economy/
romney_china/index.htm (accessed October 23, 2012); many U.S. union leaders, on
the other hand, believe that negotiating with China is part of the larger loss of
economic power driven by globalization, which should be met with nationalist tariffs
and traditional unionizing, as seen in Bernie Woodall and Ben Klayman, Special
273
Report: The UAWs Last Stand, Reuters, December 29, 2011, http://www.reuters.com/
article/2011/12/29/us-usa-autos-south-idUSTRE7BS0E020111229 (accessed October
23, 2012); as indicated here, both positions are hopelessly provincial.
144. Susan Waltz, Reclaiming and Rebuilding the History of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Third World Quarterly 23 (2002): 43748.
145. Summer B. Twiss, A Constructive Framework for Discussing Confucianism and
Human Rights, in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and
Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 41.
146. Tu Weiming, Epilogue: Human Rights as a Confucian Moral Discourse, in
Confucianism and Human Rights, 296307, esp. 29899.
147. Henry Rosemont Jr., Human Rights: A Bill of Worries, in Confucianism and
Human Rights, 5556; Tu Weiming, Human Rights as a Confucian Moral
Discourse, in Confucianism and Human Rights, 299.
148. For Lius critique of the Partys use of Confucius to justify tyranny, see
Yesterdays Stray Dog Becomes Todays Guard Dog (2007) in No Enemies, No
Hatred, 188200.
149. Jacques, When China Rules the World, 210.
150. Foot, Rights Beyond Borders, 254.
151. See Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New
York: Public Affairs, 2005); a similar call is made in Elizabeth Economy and
Michel Oksenberg, eds., China Joins the World: Progress and Prospects (New York:
Council on Foreign Relations, 1999), and in Jacques, When China Rules the
World, 4039.
152. Gilley, Chinas Democratic Future, 137.
153. Yang Jisheng, in an interview with Ian Johnson, Finding the Facts about Maos
Victims, New York Review of Books, December 20, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/
blogs/nyrblog/2010/dec/20/fnding-facts-about-maos-victims/ (accessed October 23,
2012); Gilley, Chinas Democratic Future, 43; Shiping Hua, Literature as Civic
Discourse in the Reform Era: Utopianism and Cynicism in Chinese Political
Consciousness, in Kluver and Powers, Civic Discourse, Civil Society, and Chinese
Communities, 147.
154. Perry Anderson, Two Revolutions, New Left Review 61 (2010): 95.
155. Arif Dirlik, Postsocialism? Reflections on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,
in Marxism and the Chinese Experience, ed. Dirlik and Maurice Meisner (London:
M. E. Sharpe, 1989), 362.
156. See William J. Dobson, The Dictators Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for
Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2012).
274
157. On the mess in Iraq, see Finally Free of Tyranny, Terrorism, and the U.S., Now was
Supposed to Be Iraqs Moment, . . . Bloomberg Businessweek, January 2329, 2012,
6471; on Iraq and Afghanistan, see the relevant reports from Human Rights Watch
(www.hrw.org), Amnesty International (www.amnesty.org), and Mdecins Sans
Frontires (www.doctorswithoutborders.org) all accessed on October 23, 2012; on
post-authoritarian Indonesia, where democracy has led to sectarian violence and
proliferating religious death squads, see Mary E. McCoy, Purifying Islam in
Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Corporatist Metaphors and the Rise of Religious
Intolerance, in this issue of Rhetoric & Public Affairs.
158. Lu, From Ideological Enemies to Strategic Partners, 352.
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Liu Xiaobo, Charter 08, and The Contested Rhetorics of Democracy and Human Rights in China

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TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS: LIU XIAOBO,

CHARTER 08, AND THE CONTESTED RHETORICS OF

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

iu Xiaobo, the former professor, prolifc author, and prominent

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

strategies available to activists who seek to change the policies of the

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

CONTESTING HUMAN RIGHTS IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

ism, which, as interpreted by the Party, points not toward prudential

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

funded in part by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which in

CHARTER 08'S APPROPRIATION OF DEMOCRACY AND THE DILEMMAS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Beginning with the Republics frst (and comparatively liberal) constitution

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

uncomfortable task of pursuing reform by adopting the foundational text of

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

rebuke to the Chinese Communist Party; by doing so in language that

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Regarding the national-minority areas of China, they call for seeking

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

judiciary, which presently does not exist in China.78 Moreover, as Priscilla

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

LIU'S NOBEL PRIZE, DISSIDENT SUPPORT, AND THE PROBLEM OF

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

center attempting to force neoliberal capitalism and weak versions of

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

came together in Oslo, amounting to the largest gathering of such fgures

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

remember that most Chinese citizens have never heard of Charter 08 or

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

catastropheit makes for blistering rhetoric. Writing in a full lather, Liu

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

is to go slow, to open up Chinese society from within, with the Party

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

hard on the expectation of compliance to authority, which Ling Chen

CONCLUSION: ON HARMONY, BEING HARMONIZED, AND ARTFUL

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

the present.155 In short, in an age of networked global neoliberalism, the

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS

TO DANCE WITH LOST SOULS

RHETORIC & PUBLIC AFFAIRS